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Hi all,

Probably a long shot, but desperate times…

Last night I tried to add 2 extra drives to my existing raid 10…something went south, long story short after hours and hours of late night Dell support, the array was not able to be saved. We finally were able to rebuild the raid, but all data was lost. I have the VM’s backed up with Veeam, I should be ok there if I can ever get the host back.

I was using the native Windows backup for the host, and have bare metal, system state, C volume, etc., basically everything but the VM’s on a USB drive.

My only way to make any progress was to install a trial version of 2019 with the hopes that I could then access my host backups with the backup/restore app and maybe get lucky and restore.

Via the Windows backup restore, I can access the host backups, but with the new temporary trial OS installed, I don’t know how I’m going to get the old C drive restored. I attempted to do a system state restore, but once again have no idea where to restore to as there is a new OS installed.

Do I have any hope for restoring the host this way? Are there other options?

Thanks, this is such a mess…our only server and I messed it up good and Monday will be here soon.

8 Spice ups
2

I would reinstall the hypervisor and then restore the VMs from Veeam.

1 Spice up
3

By memory, when installing the host OS there is an option to restore from backup, maybe under Repair Install. No need to install a trial OS. During install select backup and recover.
It has been a while since I have had to do this with windows backup but there is a way to do this without installing a trial OS.

2 Spice ups
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That’s what I ended up doing, thanks for the advice.

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Yeah I thought I was covered with the backups I had, but I was never able to restore and time was the enemy. I needed to get those VM’s back up asap, so they are hosted on the trial version. Now I have some time to breath, can consult a local pro and then figure out the rest. Big picture, Windows backup is out, I’ll find a paid version of Veeam that wraps up the whole environment.

6

Veeam Agent (free) would have created a USB Boot drive so you could have just booted from that and ran your restore from it.

Next step up a WIn10 or server running Veeam B&R Community (still free) would have done it better

Next step up (still free) a repository running some version of Linux and hardened.

WSB is not a good deal even if it is free.

2 Spice ups
7

Unless you had 5+ nics and a bunch of other services running on on the host, trying to restore the host from a backup seems like a waste of time to me.

Just get Hyper-V back up and restore/import the VMs like you did then work on your backup scheme.

1 Spice up
8

WSB restore is like any other restore, either bare metal or from a running instance:

Bare metal restore - boot from install media, recovery options and restore.
Or with running OS (same as original version) restore over the top - system state, original location > go.

Unless it was the main DC or had a lot of customization and data, it is often quicker to just reinstall a fresh copy (activation often being the only real pain).

2 Spice ups
9

There is no sense in backing up a hypervisor. Since its only job is running virtual machines, no other roles, services, or data should be located on it, so it takes minutes literally to reinstall a hypervisor from the ground up in case of failure. Some people even recommend doing that from time to time to keep the hypervisor in a fit shape https://www.hyper-v.io/several-tips-hints-full-throttle-hyper-v-performance/ .

Since your hypervisor is up and running, you can still try to restore your Windows Server Backup files using a virtual machine for that purpose if required. If just some files are needed, feel free to mount WSB files (VHD containers) as is via simple double-click to get access to the data.

2 Spice ups