Using CA ARCserve D2D › Perform Bare Metal Recovery

Perform Bare Metal Recovery

Bare Metal Recovery (BMR) is the process of restoring a computer system from "bare metal" including reinstalling the operating system and software applications, and then restoring the data and settings. The BMR process lets you restore a full machine with minimal effort, even to different hardware. BMR is possible because during the block-level backup process, CA ARCserve D2D not only captures the data, but also all information related to the operating system, installed applications, configuration settings, necessary drivers, and so on. All relevant information that is necessary to perform a complete rebuild of the computer system from "bare metal" is backed up into a series of blocks and stored on the backup location.

Before you can perform BMR, you must have:

• One of the following:
  • A customized Windows PE image which is released along with the CA ARCserve D2D product.
  • A BMR USB stick which is created from the boot kit wizard, along with the Windows 7/Windows Vista/Windows 2008/Windows 2008R2 installation media (CD/DVD). (The USB stick can also be used with the Windows PE image instead of the installation media to load the necessary drivers during BMR, if required).

    Note: When using a USB stick you can add additional drivers to it which you cannot do with the Windows PE image.

• At least one full backup available.

Dynamic disks will be restored at disk level only. If your data is backed up to a local volume on a dynamic disk, you will not be able to restore this dynamic disk during BMR. In this scenario, to restore during BMR you will need to either back up to a volume on another drive, back up to a remote share, or export a recovery point to another location and then perform BMR from the exported Recovery Point.

Note: If you perform BMR to a dynamic disk, you should not perform any pre-BMR disk operations (such as cleaning, deleting volume, etc.) or else the presence of the disk may not be recognized.

Regardless of which method you used to create the Boot Kit image, the BMR process is basically the same.

To perform Bare Metal Recovery

1. Insert the saved Boot Kit image media and boot the computer.
   • If you are using a saved Windows PE Image, insert the Boot Kit image CD/DVD.
   • If you are using a USB stick, insert the Windows Server Installation CD/DVD and connect the USB stick with the saved Boot Kit image.

   The BIOS Setup Utility screen is displayed.

2. From the BIOS Setup Utility screen, select the CD-ROM Drive option to launch the boot process.

   Note: If you are using Windows PE image to perform BMR you will also need to select an architecture (x86/x64) and press Enter to continue.

   

3. The CA ARCserve D2D language select screen is displayed. Select a language and press "Next" to continue.

   Note: If you are performing BMR with a BMR USB stick and a Windows 7 or Windows Server 2008 / 2008 R2 installation media (CD/DVD) which does not support a Multilingual User Interface (MUI), it will not display this language select screen.

   

4. The Bare Metal Recovery process is initiated and the BMR wizard screen opens.

   

5. From the BMR wizard screen, select machine (or volume) which contains recovery points for your backup image.

   CA ARCserve D2D lets you recover from any local drive or from a network share.

   • If you are recovering from a local backup, the BMR wizard will automatically detect and display all volumes that contain recovery points.
   • If you are recovering from a remote share, you need to browse to the remote location where the recovery points are stored. If there are multiple machines that contain recovery points, all machines will be displayed.

     You may also need access information (User Name and Password) for the remote machine.

     Note: The network must be up and running to browse to remote recovery points. If necessary you can check/refresh your network configuration information or load any missing drivers from the Utilities menu.

6. If the BMR module cannot detect any local destination volume the "Select a Folder" dialog is automatically displayed and you need to provide the remote share where the backups are residing.

   

7. Select the folder where the recovery points for your backup are stored and click OK. (You can click the green arrow icon to validate the connection to the selected location).

   The BMR wizard screen now displays the machine name (in the upper left pane), along with the related backup information (in the upper right pane) and all the corresponding recovery points (in the lower left pane).

   

8. Select which recovery point to restore.

   The related information for the selected recovery point is displayed (in the lower right pane). This display includes such information as the type of backup that was performed (and saved), the backup destination, and the volumes that were backed up.

   Note: If your machine is a Domain Controller, CA ARCserve D2D supports a non-authoritative restore of the active directory (AD) database file during BMR. (Restore of MSCS clusters are not supported).

9. Verify that this is the recovery point that you want to restore and click Next.

   A BMR wizard screen is displayed with the available recovery mode options.

   

10. Select the recovery mode.

    The available options are Advanced Mode and Express Mode.

    • Select Advanced Mode if you want to customize the recovery process.
    • Select Express Mode if you want minimal interaction during the recovery process.

      (This is the default mode).

    Note: The remainder of this procedure is applicable only if you selected the Advanced Mode and will provide information to guide you through the BMR process.

11. Click Next.

    The BMR utility starts locating the machine to be recovered and displays the corresponding disk partition information.

    The upper pane shows the disk configuration that you have on the current (target) machine and the lower pane shows the disk partition information that you had on the original (source) machine.

    Important! In the lower pane, if a red X icon is displayed for a source volume, it indicates that this volume contains system information and has not been assigned (mapped) to the target volume. This system information volume from the source disk must be assigned to the target disk and restored during BMR or the reboot will fail.

    Note: When restoring to another disk/volume, the capacity of new disk/volume must be the same size or larger than original disk/volume. In addition, disk resizing is for basic disks only, and not for dynamic disks.

    

12. If the current disk information you are seeing does not appear correct, you can access the Utilities menu and check for missing drivers.
13. If necessary, on the target volume pane you can click on the Operations drop-down menu to display the available options.

    From this menu you can reset any existing partitions or create new partitions to correspond to the disk partitions on the source volume. (Reset means to reload the source and target disk layout information from the configure file and current OS, and discard any user changed disk layout information).

    Note: When mapping to another disk, the capacity of each mapped target volume must be the same size or larger than the corresponding source volume.

    

14. Click on each target volume and from the pop-up menu, select the Map Volume From option to assign a source volume to this target volume.

    The Select a Basic Volume dialog opens.

    

15. From Select a Basic Volume dialog, click the drop-down menu and select the available source volume to assign to the selected target volume. Click OK.
    • On the target volume, a check mark icon is displayed, indicating that this target volume has been mapped to.
    • On the source volume, the red X icon changes to a green icon, indicating that this source volume has been assigned to a target volume.
16. When you are sure that all volumes that you want to restore and all volumes that contain system information are assigned to a target volume, click Next.

    The Submit Disk Changes screen opens, displaying a summary of the selected operations. For each new volume being created, the corresponding information is displayed.

    

17. When you have verified the summary information is correct, click Submit. (If the information is not correct, click Cancel).

    Note: All operations to the hard drive will not take effect until you submit it.

    On the target machine, the new volumes are created and mapped to the corresponding source machine.

18. When the changes are completed, click OK.

    The Summary of Restore Settings screen opens, displaying a summary of the volumes to be restored.

    Note: On the bottom of restore summary window, the drive letters listed in "Destination Volume" column are automatically generated from the Windows Preinstallation Environment (WinPE). They may be different from the drive letters listed in "Source Volume" column. However, the data will still be restored to proper volume even if drive letters are different.

    

19. When you have verified that the summary information is correct, click OK.

    The restore process starts. The BMR wizard screen displays the restore status for each volume.

    • Depending upon the size of the volume being restored, this operation may take some time.
    • During this process you are restoring, block-by-block whatever you had backed up for that recovery point and creating a replica of the source machine on the target machine.
    • By default, the option to automatically reboot your system after recovery is selected. If necessary, you can clear this option and reboot manually at a later time.
    • If necessary, you can cancel or abort the operation at any time.

      

20. From the Utilities menu, you can access the BMR Activity Log and use the Save option to save the Activity Log.

    By default, the Activity Log will be saved to the following location:

    X:\windows\system32\dr\log.

    Note: To avoid getting a Windows-generated error, you should not save the Activity Log on your desktop or create a new folder on your desktop using the "Save As" option from the BMR Activity Log window.

21. If you are restoring to dissimilar hardware (the SCSI/FC adapter which used to connect hard drives may have been changed), and there is no compatible driver detected in your original system, a "driver injection" page will be displayed to allow you to provide drivers for these devices.

    You can browse and select drivers to inject to the recovered system so that even if you recovering to a machine with dissimilar hardware, you can still bring the machine back after BMR.

22. When the BMR process is completed, a confirmation notification is displayed.

Notes: After completion of BMR:

• The first backup performed will be a Verify Backup.
• Verify that the BIOS is configured to boot from the disk on which the boot volume was restored to.
• When the machine has been rebooted, you may need to configure the network adapters manually if you restored to dissimilar hardware.
• For dynamic disks, if the status of the disk is offline, you can manually change it to online from the disk management UI (accessed by running the Diskmgmt.msc control utility).
• For dynamic disks, if the dynamic volumes are in a failed redundancy status, you can manually resynchronize the volumes from the disk management UI (accessed by running the Diskmgmt.msc control utility).