1196 - How to do a Bare Metal Recovery using InstantData (v20.4 and earlier)

One of the ways in which you can use InstantData is to do a Bare Metal Recovery (BMR) directly to new physical (or virtual) hardware.

InstantData BMR is best suited to restores to a physical machine that is similar to that on which the backup was run. If, as a fallback, you are restoring to different physical hardware, booting may fail because certain required drivers are not present in the installation. We recommend building a fresh machine and restoring the system state instead.

Supported partition types

1. BIOS partitions
   • Primary and logical partitions:
     • NTFS
     • FAT32
     • EFI system partition
     • Windows Recovery Environment
   • Extended partitions
   • Dynamic disks (Windows Logical Disk Manager) - will be converted into basic disks
2. GPT partitions
   • Windows basic data partition
     • NTFS
     • FAT16/FAT32
     • ReFS - will be converted to NTFS
   • EFI system partition
   • Dynamic disks (Windows Logical Disk Manager) - will be converted into basic disks

Note: For more on recovering dynamic disks, see Article 878. 

Before you begin

You will need:

• Access to the Storage Platform Console
• An external storage device (e.g. USB flash drive)
• A target machine or VM (of the same disk size as the original machine, or larger) that is connected to the internet
• A Windows installation DVD

Instructions

1. In the Storage Platform Console, right-click the relevant account name and go to InstantData > Share.

2. Select Bare Metal Recovery and click Download.

3. Once the zip file has downloaded, extract its contents to the external storage device.

4. Connect this device to the target machine, ensuring that the machine can read the device. 

5. Start the target machine using the Windows installation DVD. When presented with the screen below, click Next.

6. Click Repair your computer.

7. Select Command Prompt.

8. Run wpeinit to initialise networking. (It is also a good idea to run ipconfig at this point to ensure your IP address can access the Storage Platform.)

9. From the command line, run diskpart. 

10. Run rescan to make sure the disk configuration information is up to date.

11. At the diskpart prompt, use list disk to list the attached disks.

12. Note which disk(s) are your restore targets. Here, Disk 1 is the USB key from which the restore is being run and so should not be modified.

13. Select the disk to be cleaned using select disk and the number, e.g. select disk 0.

14. Enter clean all.

15. Locate the BMR application (InstantDataBMR.exe) on the external storage device. Execute the application on the target machine using command-line arguments, specifying the following parameters:

Your Storage Platform address will be one of these, or an internal address.

You will be prompted to supply any required parameters that are missing. For help, run the application with -help. 

16. The following extra parameters can also be used.

• -Volumes is used to select the volumes you wish to restore. If this parameter is used, only the selected volumes (with the format disk:volume) will be restored. For example, -Volumes=1:1,1:2,3:1 will restore disk 1 volume 1, disk 1 volume 2, and disk 3 volume 1.
• -DiskMap is used to map specific source disks to a different target disk (with the format sourcedisk:targetdisk). For example, -DiskMap=2:3,3:2 will map disk 2 from the backup to disk 3 in the restore, and disk 3 in the backup to disk 2 in the restore.

17. InstantData will now start recreating your drives on the target machine. Once this process is complete, reboot your machine.

Troubleshooting

Under certain conditions (e.g. in VMware), the disk presented to a machine may not be seen as empty of data when attempting an InstantData BMR. The error "Specified physical disk is not empty!" will be presented.

To resolve this, use DiskPart to zero the disk, as follows:

1. From the command line, run diskpart. 

2. Run rescan to make sure the disk configuration information is up to date.

3. At the diskpart prompt, use list disk to list the attached disks.

4. Note which disk(s) are your restore targets. Here, Disk 1 is the USB key from which the restore is being run and so should not be modified.

5. Select the disk to be cleaned using select disk and the number, e.g. select disk 0.

6. Enter clean all.

7. Once this has completed, do the same for any other disks required for the restore.

8. Type exit to quit DiskPart.

The restore command can then be run as normal.