Been using urbackup for a while, and I thought its about time to do a test of a restore… however, while the restore operation completes without an error, the restored windows 11 machine won’t boot.
Versions and stuff:
Platform: original machine, proxmox 9, restored machine, proxmox 9
VM: windows 11,
VM hardware / options - as far as I can tell, they’re the same on the restore test machine as original.
Ur backup version 2.5.37, image backup status is ‘ok’.
Image backup file format raw-copy-on-write file
I highly suspect its the UEFI, but I can’t be 100% sure
Retore to HDD is fine
First boot: windows bootloader shows error and it restarts
Tries to diagnose and fix but can’t
(very similar to another post), where they did a windows 11 installation and then did a restore over the top - admittedly I’ve not tried this, however, I’m attempting a ‘bare metal’ restore test… i.e. performing a restore with nothing but the restore CD, and the backup image…
It may be something specific to proxmox? not sure…
Does anyone have experience on how to do a backup/restore in this situation?
Also, would I be better backing up my VMs and physical machines using compressed VHD instead? For my physical machines, can you do an image restore from a VHD?
Do you still have the original vm? If yes maybe you could compare the original VM config with the current one.
What often happens is that because the restore CD is a Linux it needs Linux specific config, but that changes the hardware away from what the restored Windows needs.
It is sometimes hard to see, but do you have the error code that Windows shows?
Many thanks for responding - I do have the original vm, as mentioned, however, I wanted to test that it was possible to restore, there’s a couple of things on this
While I have the original VM, the VM itself is stored within linux LVM - so it isn’t like a file that I can simply duplicate. I did however, restore a proxmox backup to the EXT4 filesystem so I could obtain the files (this backup worked without issue), I’ve duplicated these to the restored VM, and it still won’t boot.
I wanted to test what would be needed if I’d lost this, or other VMs - to come up with a procedure to perform a restore…
On the backups, I can see that urbackup is backing up the UEFI disk (referred to as ‘ESP’?) - if it can back it up, I’m uncertain why it can’t restore it?
With regard to a windows error code, I did spot “inaccessible boot device 0x7b”.
I had a similar ‘real’ rather than ‘test’ situation, where I had upgraded the disk on my PC - so the new disk was blank - at the time, I couldn’t boot the restore ISO, so I ended up using another tool that backed up the hard disk image to re-build my disk… so it sounds like I’d be in a similar position as this.
I guess what concerns me is that urbackup takes an image of my PC, however, if its not possible to restore that image (and for example, the hard drive has died, so getting things like the EFI/TPM data isn’t possible, and there’s no install disk, because its an OEM), then I’ve got to take extra steps using another tool in order to save another (safe) image of the original disk - which I’m guessing most people won’t do as they’ll rely on urbackup, and also this takes up more of my storage space to accomodate urbackup images as well as an original/periodic image backup from another app…?
means disk type is not same as the original.
Seems there is sata/ide/virtio swap.
Windows wants same disk type attached to same controller type, regardless VM or bare metal.
AHCI/SATA native driver can be always “enabled” in Windows registry : [HKLM\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Services\storahci\StartOverride]
“0”=dword:00000000
Same for NVMe :
[HKLM\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Services\stornvme\StartOverride]
“0”=dword:00000000
Not sure it’s relevant here, but I have restore issues with Windows 11 and Windows Server 2022/2025 same kind. I use restore CD lates version to recover Hyper-V VM to VM of same type. Got error like this:
