Windows BMR: Requirements and Compatibility

Bacula Enterprise Only

This solution is only available for Bacula Enterprise. For subscription inquiries, please reach out to sales@baculasystems.com.

Compatibility

Bacula Enterprise

WindowsBMR 3.4 is compatible with Bacula Enterprise 6.2.6 and later.

Hardware

The ISO image is 64-bit and must be run on a 64-bit Intel x86 compatible processor. You can use it to restore any 32-bit Windows OS, but the CPU must be 64-bits. If you are restoring on a virtual machine, you may be required to temporarily switch the CPU or the Virtual Machine OS to 64-bits. After the restore, you may switch back into the 32-bit mode. Your restore machine must have 1GB of RAM, but 2GB is recommended.

Windows

WindowsBMR 3.4 can do Bare Metal Recovery of all 32 and 64-bit XP versions of Windows and later.

It has been successfully tested on most recent Windows versions, including Server, Home and Workstation editions, as well as on legacy BIOS and (U)EFI-enabled systems.

Restrictions

The Bacula Enterprise VSS Plugin (vss-fd.dll)

The Bacula Enterprise VSS Plugin (vss-fd.dll) cannot be used with BMR. In fact, when doing backups to be used for BMR, you must not use the VSS Plugin otherwise the BMR restore will fail. This is because our BMR uses Windows PE, which does not include VSS capability, so when Bacula attempts to restore data backed up by the vss-fd.dll plugin, it will fail.

Do not confuse the plugin with the VSS option in the Fileset! VSS in the Fileset is enabled by default and must be enabled for a WindowsBMR backup.

If you need to restore a backup made with the vss-fd.dll plugin, please do so after you have restored your system with the BMR.

Restrictions in Using the BMR

As mentioned above, you cannot do a WindowsBMR restore with a Bacula backup that used the vss-fd.dll plugin. It will fail in Microsoft WinPE environment.
The drive letter X: is used internally by the rescue system and cannot be used during the restore procedure. If you have an X: drive, you must choose “Manual Partitioning” and use another free drive letter to restore it, then change the letter assignment after the first reboot.
If you restore your server on different hardware such as IDE, SATA, SAS, SCSI, you will have to manage driver problems. Microsoft Windows will probably ask you to re-enter the license key for Windows. This is also true when moving between different virtual infrastructure.
The rescue system needs to connect to your Director using the Bacula bconsole protocol (9101/tcp by default). After connecting, the Director Daemon uses the address from which bconsole was executed to contact the Client being restored. If the Client is behind a firewall or uses network address translation (NAT) it is possible that the Director will not be able to connect to the rescue Client. To avoid this kind of problem, we recommend that you ensure that the machine to be rescued resides in the same network as the Director and the Storage Daemon.

The restart command has limitations with plugins, as it initiates the Job from scratch rather than continuing it. Bacula determines whether a Job is restarted or continued, but using the restart command will result in a new Job.

Known Issues

Disk Labels

Disk labels can contain non-ASCII characters. These characters are sometime replaced by “0” (zero) at restore time. This should have no consequences on the restored host.

Volume Mount Points

All Volume mount points to be restored must have paths that are ASCII characters. This restriction will be removed in a future WindowsBMR version.

The machine fails to boot following the restore

Users have reported that running the command below fixes the issue.

bcdboot c:\windows

You can reboot from the ISO image and run the command using the command prompt that appears after you have selected the keyboard layout.

A common reason for boot failure is the exclusion of files that are critical for the machine’s startup by the user. Review your Fileset and verify if you have inadvertently excluded files due to their file extensions or the directories containing system files.