Hello Jason,

Thank you for posting here.

What you have thought hit the point.

To recover the operating system or a full server, we should first do the following:

If you want to recover to a new hard disk, please make sure the disk is at least as big as the disk that contained the volumes that were backed up, regardless of the size of those volumes. For example, if there is only one volume that was 100 GB on a 1 TB disk during backup, we should use a disk that is at least 1 TB when perform the restoring.

If you are recovering just the operating system, please make sure that you have a backup available that contains at least the critical volumes of the server. If you are recovering the full server, make sure that you have a backup available that contains all volumes of the server. To perform a bare metal recovery, make sure you have a backup enabled for bare metal recovery (or full server recovery).

Please follow the instructions of the document to restore the backup to a proper sized target disk array.

Recover the Operating System or Full Server

http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/cc755163.aspx

Hope the information can be helpful.

Hello Jason,

Thank you for your reply.

For your further concern, this same or bigger disk size requirement is by design for Windows Server 2008 and Windows Vista. As a suggestion, we recommend you use a bigger disk for Bare Metal Restore.

Currently we cannot edit the backup size. However, to fulfill your demand, there is a possible given workaround to restore the backup to smaller disk size.

Workaround: To recover the System manually using Volume recovery

By using this workaround, at minimum the OS critical partitions should be of the same size for the volume recovery.

To recovery the System manually from Windows Recovery Environment (when BMR Complete PC Restore is not working), user has to recover all the partitions individually and then set the BCD boot entries.

Please follow the below mentioned steps:

1) Get the backup version from the backup target.

2) From version, get the size of partitions at the time of backup.

3) Recreate the partitions manually with same or more size.

4) Perform volume recovery of Individual volumes.

5) Set the Active bit for System volume.

6) Fix the Boot entries.

Please replace anything marked under <> with actual values. The yellow marked entries are for sample only. We have to pick the actual values from his system. Also assuming the Boot disk is disk 0 in this case.

Open Command prompt:

1) Do wbadmin get versions backuptarget:<X:>.

a. Select the version id from. E.g. Version identifier: 02/11/2009-09:14

Note: If the backup target is network share, then run start /w wpeinit to enable networking.

2) Do wbadmin get items version:<versioned> -backuptarget:<X:>

a. This will give the list of volumes that were backed up and their sizes.

3) Using Diskpart, recreate your volumes of the same or more size. Assume that the Boot disk is Disk 0 and is empty. Disk 0 is the boot disk and is the first disk in BIOS boot order.
If the required partitions are already present then skip the steps below.

a. Diskpart.exe

b. List disk

c. Select disk 0.

d. Create par primary size=<size>

e. Format fs=ntfs quick label=OS (Format the OS partition with NTFS)

f. Assign letter=D (assign drive letter D: to OS volume)

g. Do the same for all the volumes you want to recover.

h. Detail disk

i. It lists the newly created partitions.

4) To recover the volumes one by one,

a. Do wbadmin get items version:<versionid> -backuptarget:<X:> .

b. Select the volume id or drive letter for OS volume that was backed up.
E.g. C: corresponds to the OS volume at backup time.

c. Wbadmin start recovery version:<versionid> -backuptarget:<x:> -itemType:Volume items:C: -recoverytarget:D:

d. Do the same for all the other volumes. Make sure that minimum space requirement is met.

e. Set the active bit of System volume from Diskpart.

f. Diskpart.exe ->

i. Select volume D:

ii. active

5) Reboot the OS and boot back into WinRE as OS is not yet bootable.

6) Select Startup-Repair option to fix the BCD boot entries.

7) Reboot and OS should be in a bootable state.

8) If OS is still not bootable, use bcdedit.exe/bootrec.exe in WinRE to fix the BCD boot options.

I understand that it will be reasonable to edit the backup so that the bare metal restore process can accept the smaller disk size, our product team are aware of this desired functionality and will definitely keep this in mind as future product development continues.

Thanks for your understandings.

Hello Jason,

I want to see if the information provided was helpful. Please keep us posted on your progress and let us know if you have any additional questions or concerns.

Sorry for the late response.

The prodecure you outline worked. The only hitch was that the Server 2008 64bit boot CD does not havea Startup-Repair option. The OS was detected and the partition size in 0MB on (unknow) Local Disk.

I used diskpart to assign the letter C to the windows partition and set it to active.
I then entered the following commands:

cd C:

bootrec.exe /fixmbr

D:\boot\bootsect.exe /nt60 all /force

del C:\boot\bcd

bootrec.exe /rebuildbcd

restart and BOOT!

I then notice an error in the Application log. MSDTC source errros
Ecent ID 4112
Ecent ID 4163
Event ID 4185

I ran the "msdtc -resetlog" command and the service starts now.

Thanks for you all your help.

Hello Jason,

Thank you for the feedback, and the solution sharing. Again, thank you for using TechNet fourm.

I had this exact same senario at a clients office this week after having 2 drives in the raid fail and the underlying Server 2008 R2 crashed, and discovering that the backup drive the SBS machine was backing up to was also corrupt, thankfully i was able to copy the complete server backup image off of the backup drive before all data on it became unusable. once i rebuilt the Hyper-V host machine and reinstalled the Server 2008 R2 OS, i tried to do a bare metal restore of sbs 2008 virtual machine and it was giving me this error:

The Windows Complete PC Restore operation failed.
Error details: The disk that is set as active in BIOS is too small to recover the original system disk.  Replace the disk with a larger one and retry the restore operation. (0x80042407)

I was working on this remotely (Thank god for IPMI) So the way i got around this was I set up Windows 7 in a VM on Hyper-V, then installed acronis true image home 2011 on the Win7 VM, created a new VHD and attached it to the Win7 VM, then force the backup drive that contained the backup image offline and attached it to the VM as well. I then used Acronis's built in utility to convert the Winddows backup image to an Acronis tib backup image. Once the conversion was complete, i used Acronis to restore the backup to the VHD.

When i tried to boot the SBS VM i got a boot failure saying it couldn't load winload.exe or something like that, so i booted the SBS VM from installation media iso and went in to the recovery console, i immediately noticed the same conditions described above by Jason Palermo, he Wrote:

"The OS was detected and the partition size in 0MB on (unknow) Local Disk."

So i followed the steps he outlined in that same post, which were:

"I used diskpart to assign the letter C to the windows partition and set it to active.
I then entered the following commands:

cd C:

bootrec.exe /fixmbr

D:\boot\bootsect.exe /nt60 all /force

del C:\boot\bcd

bootrec.exe /rebuildbcd

restart and BOOT!"

It worked like a champ, the only side effect was that there was no virtual network adapter present, i had to reinstall the Hyper-V guest add-ons to restore the virtual netwotk adapter, then had to have device manager show non-present devices to remove the previous virtual network adapter that was now causing a warning that the IP address was already assigned to a network adapter that was currently not present in the machine. using the following commands at cmd prompt:

set devmgr_show_nonpresent_devices=1

start devmgmt.msc

Once device manager is onen click view>show hidden divices, then expand network adapters and remove the missing adapter.

This recovery has been a nightmare, but the seemingly unrecoverable SBS 2008 VM has now been running several hours and all seems well...

David,

  Thanks for your post.  I was getting the same error (Error details: The disk that is set as active in BIOS is too small to recover the original system disk.  Replace the disk with a larger one and retry the restore operation.) when trying to do p2v using source win7 install into hyper-V  on  VM target (Hyper-V is running on Windows Server 2008 R2). 

The source system-volume capacity is ~300GB, of which only ~20GB is used.  In my original/failed attempts I (incorrectly) sized the target VM disk for 350GB...thinking it should be plenty big enough.  However, as you mention, the target DISK must be greater than or equal to the source DISK - i.e. ~1TB in this case (NOT the source VOLUME).

Suggestion: Until there is a code fix (which I certainly support/encourage) to allow smaller target disk sizes (than the source)...perhaps it would not be as difficult to better document the problem with an improved error message - ex. say "for a recovery to be successful, the TARGET PHYSICAL DISK SIZE must be greater than or equal to the BACKUP/SOURCE PHYSICAL DISK SIZE.  To restate this another way, regarding this issue, VOLUME SIZE is NOT pertinant.  Nor is VOLUME USAGE."  I expect there are others who have also struggled with this same problem - effort and time which could be minimized significantly with an improved error message.

Well I installed Silverlight Beta5 and uninstalled Silverlight 4 and my machine went fubar (windows 2k8 server). I methodically backup and have to run a special .bat file I found online because Windows Server Backup is atrocious and it was the best I could find.

Now I cannot install SL again, my SQL Express database master table is corrupted, and I cannot uninstall VS 2010 SP 1 because it wa MSI that I am now too shot to go folder/net spehlunkin' for.

I get the dreaded 

For the MSFT personnel - both support and development - that support this forum and windows server:

I couldn't agree more with the sentiment in this thread (Though I think more professional tone might be better in some cases).  

 The point of a Bare Metal Restore is to quickly and easily restore data from a backup.  think about it.  This is by definition,  always one of the most stressful moments of an IT professional's career 

In the real world, sometimes you can't have access to the exact hardware you would like to have in order to get something back up and running in a hurry. In 2011, one's ability to move a modern OS and all of its bits from one machine to another to simplify a hardware upgrade - without using a third party product - is a reasonable expectation.   

• First off, the error itself is nearly useless.  How about a clue as to which disk or partition the thing is choking on?  forcing the admin to go to the command line and dig that up is extremely poor UX.
• If one has enough space for the backed up data to be written on their new hardware, the backup/restore software has absolutely no business impeding the admin from restoring that data.  You are effectively penalizing the admin for what may have been good capacity planning decisions.  If I planned for 500GB on my server, but then wind up only needing 100, exactly why did MSFT decide to prevent me from restoring my backup to a 200GB disk? This is ludicrous. 
• I don't dispute whether or not David Shen's workaround will actually get the job done - but the idea that you'd have to manually set partition sizes is ridiculous.  The restore console should be able to perform some calculation on the backup set to determine whether or not the backup footprint will be able to fit on the selected destination.  If it can't, then it's reasonable to expect to restore operation to tell you, and maybe even let you re-allocate the partitions in a way that match up with the backed up data footprint.
• Most of us would probably settle for the ability to quickly and easily restore *just* the OS partition in many cases from this BMR method, and then restore data partitions in a separate step. That would be a massive step in the right direction - help us get the os back up and running, and we'll deal with the rest once we're in there.  
• How MSFT has let this slide for over 2 years now is really hard to accept.

To summarize, IMHO: There is a major, fundamental disconnect here between what the user (a/k/a the sysadmin) needs - and how the software actually functions.  In this case, what should be a simple operation consists of a series of nearly impossible roadblocks.  it is exactly this type of scenario that puts Microsoft in a very bad light and leads to marketplace erosion.  The Windows Server development team would do well to carefully re-examine the decisions here and fix this.  It's the difference between getting vociferously thanked vs. cursed out and/or replaced by other solutions.

wbadmin start sysrecovery

I just came to this issue while trying to restore a system imagem from a big dead HDD to a smaller backup HDD. If the tool only restores to bigger disks, the it is HALF-USELESS. In fact, I could not get a new image from my system (duh, the disk died suddenly) and all I had was a completely useless system image. 

As this was a desktop, I just installed Windows again. But will not trust in the builtin tools anymore.

Hello Jason,

 

Thank you for your reply.

 

For your further concern, this same or bigger disk size requirement is by design for Windows Server 2008 and Windows Vista. As a suggestion, we recommend you use a bigger disk for Bare Metal Restore.

 

Currently we cannot edit the backup size. However, to fulfill your demand, there is a possible given workaround to restore the backup to smaller disk size.

 

Workaround: To recover the System manually using Volume recovery

 

By using this workaround, at minimum the OS critical partitions should be of the same size for the volume recovery.

 

To recovery the System manually from Windows Recovery Environment (when BMR Complete PC Restore is not working), user has to recover all the partitions individually and then set the BCD boot entries.

 

Please follow the below mentioned steps:

 

1)    Get the backup version from the backup target.

2)    From version, get the size of partitions at the time of backup.

3)    Recreate the partitions manually with same or more size.

4)    Perform volume recovery of Individual volumes.

5)    Set the Active bit for System volume.

6)    Fix the Boot entries.

 

Please replace anything marked under <> with actual values. The yellow marked entries are for sample only. We have to pick the actual values from his system. Also assuming the Boot disk is disk 0 in this case.

 

Open Command prompt:

1)    Do wbadmin get versions backuptarget:<X:>.

a.    Select the version id from. E.g. Version identifier: 02/11/2009-09:14

Note: If the backup target is network share, then run start /w wpeinit to enable networking.

 

2)    Do wbadmin get items version:<versioned> -backuptarget:<X:>

a.    This will give the list of volumes that were backed up and their sizes.

 

3)    Using Diskpart, recreate your volumes of the same or more size. Assume that the Boot disk is Disk 0 and is empty. Disk 0 is the boot disk and is the first disk in BIOS boot order.
If the required partitions are already present then skip the steps below.

a.    Diskpart.exe

b.    List disk

c.    Select disk 0.

d.    Create par primary  size=<size>        

e.    Format fs=ntfs quick label=OS               (Format the OS partition with NTFS)

f.     Assign letter=D                 (assign drive letter D: to OS volume)

g.    Do the same for all the volumes you want to recover.

h.    Detail disk

i.      It lists the newly created partitions.

 

4)    To recover the volumes one by one,

a.    Do wbadmin get items version:<versionid> -backuptarget:<X:> .

b.    Select the volume id or drive letter for OS volume that was backed up.
E.g. C: corresponds to the OS volume at backup time.

c.    Wbadmin start recovery version:<versionid> -backuptarget:<x:> -itemType:Volume items:C:  -recoverytarget:D:

d.    Do the same for all the other volumes. Make sure that minimum space requirement is met.

e.    Set the active bit of System volume from Diskpart.

f.     Diskpart.exe ->

                                          i.    Select volume D:

                                         ii.    active

5)    Reboot the OS and boot back into WinRE as OS is not yet bootable.

6)    Select Startup-Repair option to fix the BCD boot entries.

7)    Reboot and OS should be in a bootable state.

8)    If OS is still not bootable, use bcdedit.exe/bootrec.exe in WinRE to fix the BCD boot options.

 

I understand that it will be reasonable to edit the backup so that the bare metal restore process can accept the smaller disk size, our product team are aware of this desired functionality and will definitely keep this in mind as future product development continues.

 

Thanks for your understandings.

Working with Server 2012 R2 in the year 2014 and found this old thread. And, there is apparently still no relief from using the entire logical volume for the image restore.

I hand edited the <UUID>_Components.xml file in the Backup <TimeStamp> folder. The restriction on the "BIOS too small" comes from parameters calculating the classical heads x sectors x bytes/sector x cylinders. I simply replaced the cylinder count with the number needed to make the resulting DiskSize tag sufficient to hold the restored filesystems. I used an online calculator to confirm the disk size parameters.

All the usual caveats apply here: Back Up Everything!

Tried the Microsoft XML editor and it proved useless. Resorted to notepad to hand edit the XML.

Hope this helps!

Thank you David. This information helped me immensely! Server is back up and running within an hour after thinking all was lost.

Hi David

Thanks a TON.

My TFS Server's replica went down. The new HDD was of smaller size. Your steps got my replica up and running within a night

Cheers.

• Edited by brile Thursday, August 07, 2014 2:11 AM formatting

same issue! by sheiss design! :@

I store more backup on the external disk; and see when restore, the design display only the first folder alphabetically !!

and the latest is the latest of first folder !!

Use browse to select driver when restore; and rename the backup folder with aa before folder name you will restore.

After start restore, and check if computer name is correct.

Work for me.