Restore Veeam Backup of Windows to a USB Drive

Hi ​@Momo70,

You basically have to keep in mind that a USB drive has to be able to become a boot device, this is depending on BIOS / UEFI configuration and the size and “architecture” of the USB drive.

The purpose of the Recovery Media is to have the interface for restores so as a target you would have to select a blank and bootable device.

I never tried to restore to an USB drive because I don’t usually use them as bootdevices. Can you confirm that die USB device is blank and can be used as such bootdevice?

Please also keep in mind that in case of file level restores (restoring single files or folders) you don’t need BMR, you can just use the Windows GUI.

Best

Lukas

Thanks for your reply.

Yes the USB drive was empty.  I had the Veeam Recovery Media on another USB and booted up from that.

Turns out Veeam Recovery Media does not allow you to restore a Windows Entire Computer Backup to a USB drive.  The USB drive I wanted to restore to was not coming up as a selection in the Veeam Restore interface.

What I ended up doing, was manually creating the EFI and Primary Partitions on the USB drive, using Diskpart.  Then I did a file/folder restore of the Windows C Drive Backup, to the primary partition of the USB Drrive.

Then I used Bcdboot to copy the UEFI boot environment files from the Windows system directory, to the EFI boot partition and recreate the BCD bootloader configuration

What happens after you reboot, is that as Windows loads, it then comes up with a Blue Screen, saying Inaccessible Boot Device.  This is due to USB 2.0/3.0 drivers aren't loaded at the stage of the boot process where Windows tries to access the boot partition.

So what needs to be done ,is make Windows load the USB Drives sooner, so you need to change the  BootDriverFlags value in the Registry to 14.

After that, Windows will boot up normally and you have a full Windows System running off the USB Drive.

The reason I did all this, is because I have a Server that is running VSphere as its main OS on the RAID Controller drives, and the Server also has an Internal USB 3.0 Interface.
So I wanted to be able to dual boot and run Window Server if ever needed for anything, and wanted to use the USB Interface to have as the Windows Server boot drive, hence my original post.

​@Momo70 glad you fixed your problem.

But just a suggestion: never ever, run Windows on the same server as your ESXi hypervisor. 
It’s not supported. Also, when Windows initialize your VMFS disks, where your VMDKs reside, your data will be lost. 

If you make this, in case your ESXi is broken, there are better ways.. think about HA in a vSphere Cluster (the you would put your VMs on a shared storage). Also a repair or new installation of the hypervisor itself, will be a better option to get your VMs running back (in the installation progress, also leave the VMFS partition untouched).

If it‘s only related to your Windows OS, restore in a VM is also a valid option. There are so many good options 😊

best, Markus