Hello,
I'm creating a disaster recovery plan, and I'm testing some procedures to perform a bare metal recovery of a Hyper-V Server 2012 R2 (the free one, not the full Windows Server), which is a node in a cluster, and I'm using the native Windows Server Backup
tool.
My environment is as follows: 04 HP blades - BL465c Gen8 - running Hyper-V Server 2012 R2 (free), all in one cluster, storing all VMs in a 3Par 7200 storage node.
The idea is to simulate the complete failure of a node, and a bare metal restore of that host, instead of manually reinstalling and configuring it from scratch. So I ran a backup job on that host, and I have a proper backup set to restore. The problem is
that I'm unable to start the Recovery Environment to restore the host.
If i try to boot the server with either Hyper-V Server ou Windows Server installation media, be it on CD-Rom, flash drive, external hard disk, pxe boot on WDS server, whatever, I can always perform a clean install, it never shows any errors, whatsoever.
The problem is that whenever I click "Repair my computer", which should launch the Recovery Environment (WinRE), it just sits there, on a blue screen, with the mouse cursor.
If I try to start WinRE by pressing F8 before the OS loads, or by holding Shift when clicking Shutdown, or even by typing "reagentc /boottore", when the server starts, it shows the progress bar with the "Loading files" text, and then
it stops in a black screen with the mouse cursor, same thing as the procedure above.
I tried dozens of alternatives, like using Windows Server 2012 R2, Hyper-V Server 2012 R2 and Windows 8.1 medias to boot into WinRE, to no avail. I then tried Windows 7 Pro SP1 media, and it loads winRE, but did not recognized most of the hardware. I supplied
the network drivers, and, as expected, it allows me to reach the part where I select the network share where the backup is located, but it throws an error saying that it can't enumerate the backups.
Some other things I've tried:
- Use the Windows Kits tools to create a Windows PE bootable flash drive, and replacing the boot.wim with winre.wim from the install media;
- Use the same tools to inject drivers for graphics, network, chipset, RAID Controller, who knows?
After all that, nothing worked.
The question here is, why on earth the newer WinRE (windows 8 and up) does not load, and the one in Windows 7 does?
And the second question is if anyone has ever had this same problem ans managed to solve it. I've ran out of ideas.
I've read through a lot of forums and comments, and things like "I can set up a fresh server faster than I can recover from backup", well, right now, all I want is to find out why WinRE is not loading, the question is not even about using bare
metal recovery.
Thanks in advance.