Very small environment - ten users and two quite old servers Fujitsu Primergy TX1310 M1 with Windows Server 2012 R2 Foundation. They have the same hardware, the only difference is in disks models and capacity. The first one is a domain controller (+DNS, DHCP, home folders, other shares). The second one is joined to domain with installed Veeam B&R 12 Community + MS SQL Server. Both servers are built on internal LSI Software RAID (four disks, 2x RAID 1). AD server has two partitions on LUN 0, the first one is OS volume. Recently we had serious power problems and AD server stopped to work properly - no licenses, no services, no RDP etc. I was able to log in locally but there was a problem with networking - the interfaces worked very slow and sometimes stopped. I was not able to start services nor change their settings - the service property window was frozen during saving. I wasn’t able to install any update because of the network problems. After next and next etc. restart it started with the license, but no networking again. SFC didn’t worked (the error). When restarted in Safe mode with CMD line SFC fixed some disk problems. But it didn’t help.
I decided to use my Veeam’s backups. I have two restore points for the server’s OS Volume. Because the network is unavailable I created recovery media (USB stick) from the backup server agent (with drivers, without network settings). I exported the backup to an external USB drive. There was no problem with restoring OS volume from the last backup point in Advanced mode (to be sure the mapping is correct). It took more than 2 hours but there was no error. During first boot of the restored system I got BSOD - critical process died. I wasn’t able to run repair or safe mode - always BSOD.
I decided to go the older restore point (created 10 days ago). This time I created the media ‘without drivers’, and like the first time I exported backup to the external drive. Now I cannot event start restoring because it’s stuck at “Recovery environment is initializing”. Tried many times waiting so long - it doesn’t work anymore. Because for the moment I have only remote access to the server with Veeam B&R I created the ISO media recovery - again with drivers, downloaded to my station and using Rufus burned to another USB stick. And it’s the same - I mean that the recovery agents hangs on “Recovery environment is initializing”.
What am I doing wrong or what I should do to restore it? I cannot use VM because the OS is WS2012R2 Foundation and it cannot work in VM. I need to do it ASAP :(
