Failure to restore TIBX image to Lenovo W340

Hi all,

I've been through a very frustrating Friday in trying to help one of my customers move their system from an old i5 system to a newly-bought Lenovo W340 with Core i7-10700K for better performance. The old setup had an SSD as the OS drive and a rotating HDD which unfortunately was picked as the boot loader location. So this makes things unneccessarily complex already but that's what the Windows installation routine did.

A full system image TIBX exists, created with Cyber Protect (aka True Image 2021). Whatever I did, I could not get the restore media to work properly on the new machine. It is a combination of multiple issues:

• W340 has an M.2 PCI-express SSD on board which requires specific storage drivers. None are available for Linux or Windows PE.
• It also has a non-standard NIC, so for network access, another specific driver is required. As the backup images are stored on a NAS, there is no easy way to get access to them other than over the network.

So the core question would be: how can I create a bootable rescue media (on USB) that is capable of including the drivers required, and using them to pull data from the network and write to the built-in M.2 SSD?

The machine came with Windows 10 preinstalled and I thought it might be a good idea to create the rescue media (along with Universal Restore) right on the new target device. Did so, but unexpectedly, the drivers needed for restore were not included with the USB bootable media as it seems. Eventually after restarting, there was no access to any storage device other than the USB stick itself, and no access to network either.

Running the restore directly on the W340 out of Cyber Protect console under the (new but to be replaced) Windows would reboot the PC, install some kind of Linux-based EFI boot loader so an USB media was not required, it looked very promising as storage and ethernet were both available, took a good amount of time showing frozen progress bars, but resulted in an unbootable system eventually after everything looked as if it might be a success. I think it is because the boot loader and OS were not on the same drive, and I had to select carefully what to restore from where. Multiple times, the dialog would not let me continue after mistakes, even after correcting them, so I had to use "back' and 'forward' to get into the dialog and take all settings again.

As a result, the only platform where it at least appeared to work is now lost and ends up in a blue screen on bootup (INACCESSIBLE_BOOT_DEVICE). I have no idea how to get that back to a working state.

Every rescue media I'm trying to build on the source PC fails. All variants of boot issues were seen: device not offered to boot from at all, device booting into a black screen with no more action, device booting into a blue screen and restarting, (Linux) device showing some sort of kernel panic. It never got into any kind of product splash screen or dialogue. One of my USB flash drives was even rendered unusable along the way.

Drivers are available on the same USB stick the system booted from but for some reason I cannot get any of them to work to make the devices available. The simple PE restore image does not even offer to add drivers, but it would be in vain anyway because Lenovo does not provide PE drivers for the critical components. The drivers I managed to download are for Windows 10 and are probably not usable with rescue media at all but there is no information about this to be found anywhere, and the media builder won't issue any "this is not going to work" message.

So what gives? I have paid for a full-blown backup and restore solution including Universal Restore, and none of it works. The only perceived security is that files can be recovered from the TIB(x) images. However, the thought was to be able to restore images from workstations immediately to any replacement PC available in a disaster situation, and the recovery itself was a total disaster until now. The customer's confidence has suffered considerably.

I cannot find any useful information on how to prepare a full system restore to a platform that needs drivers, which drivers to use, how and when to include them, whatever.

So what would be the strategy here? The new system is totally different from the old one, and as it's a ThinkStation with a very modern set of hardware components, a lot of generic drivers are apparently not compatible. Luckily, the old system is still up and running and continuing to make backups so I can pick up later but next time it better be a success and not another round of embarrassment.

Sorry that some parts of this story are lacking detail but I missed to take notes so this is rather what I remember. The key issue should be clear anyway.

Thanks for any advice!

Cheers,

Joe