Restoring backups from machines with uefi instead of BIOS

[Mactagish01]

Hi all,

I've just downloaded the free version of VMWare Workstation 12 Player to have a bit of a play around and I tried to restore a recent backup of Server 2008 R2 but it failed because the backup was created on a uefi based machine, and the VM is bios based. I can't seem to find where to change that in the VM settings. Any idea what I can do to sort this?

Thanks in advance,

Mac.

[dariusd]

VMware Player doesn't have the "Advanced" panel in the VM Settings which would normally allow access to the firmware selection.

The good news is that the VMware Player virtualization engine still handles EFI firmware just fine, even though the option is not officially supported on Player and doesn't appear in the user interface.  You just need to do some manual editing of the VM's config file to make it happen.  See the very end of the "How do I start using EFI firmware?" section in this document: Using EFI/UEFI firmware in a VMware Virtual Machine

For instructions on editing the VM's config file: Editing the .vmx file of a VMware Workstation and VMware Player virtual machine (2057902) | VMware K...

I'd be interested to hear the outcome of your experiment.  Which backup/restore tool are you using?

Cheers,

--

Darius

[Mactagish01]

Thanks Darius, that has worked and I'm currently restoring my backup. I was just using Windows Server backup. I'll report back and let you know how I go.

Cheers,

Mac.

[Mactagish01]

Hi Darius,

I've encountered another issue - the server won't boot properly. Windows starts to load, but then does a quick blue screen and reboots. I've tried startup repair (no issues found) and also bcdedit and bootrec. No joy.

Some more background might help - I was approached by a customer whose server just died due to water damage (leaking roof) and they had a recent backup. I recommended they try restoring the backup to a VM instead of purchasing a new physical machine, but I wasn't sure it would be supported by VMWare. The customer is working around the server loss (not their main server) in the short term, until I either get it working in VMWare, or they have to buy a new machine.

So basically I'm trying to restore a server 2008 R2 physical backup (made with Windows Server Backup) to a VM.

Cheers

Mac.

[dariusd · Accepted solution]

Can you capture the blue screen message?  My guess is that it would be INACCESSIBLE_BOOT_DEVICE, which is expected when the destination machine's mass storage controllers require different drivers from those in use on the source machine.

What was the mass storage controller for the boot disk in the source physical server?  If your VM is configured to use a virtual SCSI hard disk (the default for Windows Server 2008 R2) and the source physical system was SATA, you might need to switch to SATA... it might be worth trying even if the source machine isn't SATA, since SATA is near-ubiquitous.  Power off the VM and go into its settings, select the Hard Disk (SCSI) entry and choose Remove.  It won't delete the virtual disk file or any of the data it contains!  Then, choose Add..., Hard Disk, pick SATA for the disk type, choose Use an existing virtual disk, and then navigate to the virtual hard disk which already exists inside the VM's folder.  (If there are multiple disks with "-s001" suffixes, ignore those... just go for the one without any suffix.)

With the disk attached via SATA, try powering on the virtual machine and see if it boots.

If the error is something other than INACCESSIBLE_BOOT_DEVICE, we might need you to obtain more information about the failure...  There's no shortage of ways for Windows to end up BSODing on boot when moved to a new set of hardware.

Cheers,

--

Darius

[Mactagish01]

Holy crap, it is booting. I think I might cry. Thanks Darius - it is at the logon screen "configuring windows". I'll monitor and report back.

[Mactagish01]

Just a follow up - that VM has been running well now for a week or two. My thanks to Darius for all his help - really appreciate it.