Note: From v19.1, Full System Restore of extended partitions is supported in ESE.
Background
When using the ESE Agent and Full System Backup, you may encounter one of the following error messages:
- ERROR : 11:30:05 Extended partitions are not supported for Full System Backups
- ERROR : 11:30:05 Volume '\\?\Volume{21862422-0282-11e8-80b4-806e6f6e6963}\' has extended partitions on device '\\?\PhysicalDrive0'
- ERROR : 11:30:05 Volume '\\?\Volume{e245b130-0283-11e8-80b7-0050569549d8}\' has extended partitions on device '\\?\PhysicalDrive0'
- ERROR : 11:30:05 Volume '\\?\Volume{21862423-0282-11e8-80b4-806e6f6e6963}\' has extended partitions on device '\\?\PhysicalDrive0'
Cause
The system running the backups has one or more extended partitions containing one or more logical drives, e.g. drive E in the image below.
Older-style Master Boot Record (MBR) disks were limited to only four partitions per disk, whereas modern GUID Partition Table (GPT) disks are limited to 128.
Using an extended partition allows users to have more than four addressable drives on an MBR disk to meet application needs.
On physical servers there, are benefits to splitting application functionality across multiple drive letters to take advantage of the performance of multiple disk spindles and caching.
For example, on an SQL server they might benefit from an SQL database being located on E:\ and the logs on F:\, where E and F are different physical disks or disk arrays.
On a virtualised server, there is little benefit to splitting application functionality across multiple drive letters where the underlying disk hardware would locate them all in the same place.
Note: Full System Backup is supported with GPT disks, as you can use up to 128 Primary Partitions and it should not be necessary to create extended partitions.
Solution
To resolve the issue, the server needs to be reconfigured, otherwise it will not be possible to restore the volume using Full System Backup.
Note: The data itself can still be recovered using the ESE Agent or InstantData, so you may wish to disregard the error.
To reconfigure:
- Stop any applications that may be using the volume.
- Make sure you have an up-to-date backup.
- Attach a new disk (or virtual disk in the case of a virtual machine) to the machine.
- Change the drive letter of the existing logical drive to an unused letter.
- Create a partition on the new disk and format this for use on the machine, setting the drive letter to the one that the old disk was using.
For example, logical drive E has been changed to drive X and a new drive E has been added:
- Perform a restore of the drive using the ESE Agent. Make sure the option Restore file and folder permissions is selected in the Advanced options.
- When the data restore has completed, restart any applications that use the drive letter.
- The original logical drive and extended partition can be deleted.
Data can also be restored from a local copy if you have the feature configured.
Note: Third-party technologies can be used to copy or change formats if desired.