Performing a dissimilar bare metal restore for Windows Vista and later servers is similar to that of Windows 2003 servers. Some of the basic differences include:
• The bare metal boot environment requires Windows Vista, 2008, or 2012 drivers to access the underlying network and storage hardware.
• Once the bare metal image has been booted and the GUI displays, storage controller drivers may be loaded into the WinPE image. This is different from the previous bare metal versions where the F6 key had to be pressed during boot time in order to load drivers.
• For dissimilar restores, the driver verification process has been eliminated. Instead, the restore of a bare metal backup is performed and then the necessary drivers are injected into the newly restored image. The injection is performed with WinPE 2.0 utilities that handle driver file verification and error reporting.
1 If performing the restore as a test, first see Considerations for bare metal test restores
2 Boot the Windows server from the boot CD. Upon completion of the boot process, the Windows Bare Metal interface displays.
3 When the WinPE image boots, an attempt is made to discover the local network hardware. Do one of the following:
• If no errors occur, proceed to Step 4.
• If a network device cannot be found, select Yes to load a driver for the network device. Drivers can be accessed from a removable device, like a USB thumb-drive. Once the driver is loaded successfully, the boot process continues and the WinPE GUI displays.
4 If a storage driver is needed to access the local storage devices, load it as follows:
• Click Bare Metal Setup.
• Select Load Driver to select the desired driver file(s). You must use 32-bit drivers to be compatible with the WinPE 2.0 environment.
• Select the target file then click Load Driver. The selected driver is loaded into the active WinPE image. If you see a failure message, the driver could not be loaded.
• When you see the message indicating the driver was loaded successfully, click OK then Exit to return to the main menu. Select Bare Metal Restore, then Rescan Disk and the local disks that are available for restore display in the list.
5 To begin the bare metal restore, select the backup and target disk information, then click Start Restore.
6 The option to view real-time statistics appears in a dialog box. Monitor the status of the restore on the Bare Metal Statistics screen, or from the Unitrends Administrator Interface at Settings > System Monitoring > Jobs.
7 Once the restore is complete, inject any necessary drivers:
• Click OK and then Exit to take you back to the Windows Bare Metal Restore screen.
• Click Rescan Disk to scan for newly created partitions and volumes.
• Click Inject Offline Driver.
8 Select drivers in the Inject Offline Driver dialog:
• Drivers can be accessed via a network share or USB thumb-drive.
• Navigate to the folder containing storage drivers.
• Select your drivers then click Inject. An attempt is made to inject all of the drivers in the selected folder. Please note that you must inject 32-bit drivers to be compatible with the WinPE 2.0 environment.
• Once the injection completes, a dialog confirming success or failure displays. If there is a failure, view the resulting log file to determine the cause.
9 Remove the bare metal CD and reboot your server into its operating system.
10 At this point the Windows boot volume (usually C:) has been restored. Create and format additional volumes as necessary.
Important! If file-level backups of the original Windows client contain files from volumes outside of the Windows boot volume, you must create and format those additional volumes. File-level restore will fail if these additional volumes do not exist.
11 Perform file-level recovery to restore your machine to its latest backup. See Executing a point-in-time restore for details.
Note for Exchange servers: If you are unable to mount Exchange databases after performing the restore, the databases may be in a Dirty Shutdown state. See this Microsoft article for details: Exchange Database is in a Dirty Shutdown State.