ShadowProtect ImageManager HeadStart Restore with HyperV

If you are using StorageCraft ShadowProtect and ImageManager, here are the steps to recover a server to a Hyper-V environment.

Background:

ShadowProtect runs on each server you want to back up, and Image Manager manages the backup storage location. Image Manager can also run “HeadStart Restore” jobs. This basically keeps a VMWare (vmdk) or HyperV (vhd(x)) hard drive copy of your backup and restores each incremental backup to this hard drive, keeping it up to date (or as up to date as your policy defines, it may be 1 hour, 1 day or longer behind the server it is backing up).

There are a few steps needs to get this hard drive ready to be booted into. I’ll go through steps here in detail.

Finalize the Hard drive.

The first job is to Finalise the Hard disk(s) you want to mount. This applies any incremental backups taken but not yet applied the virtual hard drive.

Under the Server in StorageCraft Image Manager, Right click on the HeadStart restore job and select Finalise.

Select the hard drives you want to recover and select the date you want to restore to. I imagine, in most cases, you can leave this as Automatically select the latest date.

Now, you need to let this run through until the status of the drive is “Finalized”

This can take some time, in my case, in this test, it took around 30 minutes. The C drive was 100Gb and D drive was 350Gb, and the hard drive was running 1 day behind the production server.

If you have not already got a Hyper-V Virtual machine to attach the hard drive to, you can use this time preparing one.

You need to add the shadow Protect Recovery Environment ISO DVD to boot from, and add the finalised hard drive(s).

Once your hard drives are finalised, and you’ve got your Hyper-V virtual machine ready, go ahead and start it, and “Press any key to boot from DVD”.

ShadowProtect Recovery Environment

The ShadowProtect Recovery Environment will boot, and you will need to select your time zone and connect to the network if needed.

Next, you will need to run the HIR Configuration (HIR is Hardware Independent Restore).

Select the drive with the operating system on it, and click start. This will run through and check all the drivers installed on the Operating System and make sure they are compatible.

Hopefully, you’ll see a match level of Good or Excellent:

HIR took about 1 minute to run in this test.

Boot Configuration Wizard

The next step is to run the Boot Configuration Wizard

Go to Tools > Boot Configuration Utility

Check the status of the operating system. This was broken, so click on Auto Repair in the top right.

If you are running GPT for boot on EFI enabled UEFI firmware

If you are using UEFI /GPT partition you may not be able to use Auto Repair to fix the boot.
Instead, you will need to run through a few additional steps:

Close the Boot Configuration Data, go to the Disk Map tab on the front page.

Select the Operating system disk.

Delete the FAT32 partition.

Create a new Primary partition and select Primary Partition type as EFI System Partition

Once created, select the new partition and format it as FAT32.

Go back into the Boot Configuration Data and run the Auto Repair.

Hopefully, this will now change the status to bootable.

Now go to File > Exit which will reboot the virtual server. Let this run through and boot into Windows.

(You may need to remove the ShadowProtect Recovery Environment DVD).

I hope this solves any problems with GPT/UEFI issues – please let me know if it does.

Thanks

Ian