Run as VM failing
Hello,
I am actually testing Acronis Backup 12 with a trial license and I am new to this product.
For the moment I'm trying to restore a full image taken from a physical computer running on Windows 10 anniversary. The backup went without problem but I cannot manage to run this image as a new VM.
When I try do do this with a Windows 2012 R2 Windows server running Hyper-V (this server is also running the Acronis backup console) , the software generates the VM with 2 vhd files named Disk_IDE0_0.vhd and Disk_IDE0_0-diff.vhd. The process takes less than a minute which seems a bit too fast for a 71GB backup. When inspecting the files from the Windows file explorer, the size of the first one is the same as the total physical size of the backuped disk (about 1TB). Unfortunately, the disk containing the vhd files is smaller than this, so the file size is wrong.
If I download the activity log, I can see some errors but I can't understand them (sorry for the French version):
...
2016-10-31 11:32:40:574 26392 I001D0000: Réparation de la capacité de démarrage du système d'exploitation.
2016-10-31 11:32:40:605 26392 I00000000: Erreur 0x0
| niveau de suivi: information
| canal: tol-activity#8359AD73-FE57-40A3-B01A-7A3F3599F9A2
| ligne: 0x0
2016-10-31 11:32:40:605 26392 I00000000: Erreur 0x0
| niveau de suivi: information
| canal: tol-activity#8359AD73-FE57-40A3-B01A-7A3F3599F9A2
| ligne: 0x0
2016-10-31 11:32:40:620 26392 I00000000: Erreur 0x0
| niveau de suivi: information
| canal: tol-activity#8359AD73-FE57-40A3-B01A-7A3F3599F9A2
| ligne: 0x0
2016-10-31 11:32:40:620 26392 I00000000: Erreur 0x0
| niveau de suivi: information
| canal: tol-activity#8359AD73-FE57-40A3-B01A-7A3F3599F9A2
| ligne: 0x0
2016-10-31 11:32:40:620 26392 I00000000: Erreur 0x0
| niveau de suivi: information
| canal: tol-activity#8359AD73-FE57-40A3-B01A-7A3F3599F9A2
| ligne: 0x0
2016-10-31 11:32:40:620 26392 I00000000: Erreur 0x0
| niveau de suivi: information
| canal: tol-activity#8359AD73-FE57-40A3-B01A-7A3F3599F9A2
| ligne: 0x0
2016-10-31 11:32:40:620 26392 I00000000: Erreur 0x0
| niveau de suivi: information
| canal: tol-activity#8359AD73-FE57-40A3-B01A-7A3F3599F9A2
| ligne: 0x0
2016-10-31 11:32:40:620 26392 I001D0000: La capacité de démarrage du système d'exploitation a été rétablie.
...
So, my question is: do the "Run as VM" needs to create a fixed disk of the same size of the original physical disk?
PS: by the way, the log file is stored a a unicode text file but does not include the BOM at start, this is not correct in my opinion.
Hi Vasily,
Thank you very much for this very useful clarification, I didn't know this.
So I was wrong about the source of my initial problem which is: I cannot start the VM created with the Run as VM feature.
Just after the start, I get a blinking cursor and nothing more is happening even if the CPU indicator in Hyper-V shows a 6% usage during hours.
I first tryied the usual bcdedit and bcdboot commands with no luck. I suppose it is normal for this kind of linked media.
Do you have an idea of what can be done to solve this?
(EDITED)
Hi Pierre,
Such problems may be caused by specifics of the source machine, i.e. whether it is BIOS or UEFI based and whether there are specifics in how the disks are organized inside (GPT or MBR disks layout).
The blinking coursor may be caused by wrong boot order inside the mounted VM - you can check the VM properties and confirm that it's booting from the correct disk (instead of network for example).
he possible variant would be to upgrade the mounted VM to Gen2 from Hyper-V manager and then change the machine properties to use EFI instead of BIOS. If this doesn't help then please contact our support team and remember to describe the specifics of your original machine, i.e. whether it uses UEFI or SecureBoot, MBR or GPT layout, etc.and note that Hyper-V on Windows Server 2012 doesn't support Secure Boot yet - its support is added in Windows Server 2016 only (applies to Linux guest OS only).
If the source (Win10) was UEFI based then it's required to have a Gen2 VM (only Gen2 supports booting from UEFI) on the Hyper-V host which is currently not directly supported by recover VM feature - it will try to convert the machine to BIOS. Therefore as a workaround you can try to perform full recovery (instead of Run VM) of the same backup onto the Hyper-V host: Recover->Virtual Machine->Hyper-V . The machine will be automatically converted to BIOS if it was UEFI and should boot properly.
Thank you.
Hi Vasily,
Thank you so much again for your very clear explanation. I think I understand now what is going on.
I was not aware about the differences between "Run as VM" and "Recover" to a VM. This last feature is what I was looking for on the very beginning.
Best regards
Pierre