Restoring backup to hyper-v vm, restore fails with 'no operating system was loaded'

You should probably try disabling Secure Boot in the bios and attempt boot again.  You should restart the machine after making this change if for some reason it does not restart itself. (restart = power down then power up)

Thanks for that tip, now it boots to the iso and shows the Acronis Universal Restore dialog.

But I am not sure what to do with that. I don't see how to proceed with a restore?

Operating System section has the "Select OS" button disabled (cannot find OS on the current machine)

Automatic driver search says Search removable media "On"

Mass Storage drivers to install anyways just has add driver...

And at the very botton it offere buttons to Reboot and Turn Off.

I don't get it. I thought by booting to the iso, it'd ask me if I wanted to restore a backup to the current system. In this case the system is a vm, with a 1 tb empty vhdx, but...I don't see any option to restore here?

Universal Restore is a seperate tool.  You want to make sure that you're selecting the main Acronis application to do the restore first.  After you restore, you can simply try to boot the restored image and see what happens - most likely a BSOD if the "hardware" is too different.  That's when you'd then boot the Universal Restore option and select the restored OS to "generalize" the drivers and hopefully make it bootable.

Take a look at the pictures in this post (although I've customized my boot menu and added other acronis tools to it, you should get the idea).  Bascially, make sure your're booting the main recovery media first and restoring and then go from there with Universal Restore if need be:

https://forum.acronis.com/forum/121829#comment-378318

Thanks Bobbo that helped a lot. Using the acronisbootablemedia.iso got me to the recovery screens. However the effort immediately hit a brick wall. First, I didn't find the empty vhdx file which I had attached to the vm waiting to be a 'destination' for the recovery. I can't understand why not - it only showed the hdd which has the backup on it. Second, I wan't sure which partition to recover first (if I had a disk to recover to, ie the first issue). I swear there was a great walk through of restoring multiple partitions, I thought by grover, which detailed showing the number column etc, and laid out the order in which to restore partitions one at at time. I can't find that page again...does anyone have that link? And does anyone know why the vhdx I created for the vm as a destination wasn't visible when booted into acronis recovery?

Acronis only supports .vhd (Windows 7).  .vhdx support (Windows 8 and newer) is not possible at this time.  .VHD support isn't even mentioned in the 2015 and newer support documentation because of this, however, .vhd still works - just not .vhdx

In VMware Workstation, I mount the acronis .iso as a virtual CD and take a full "offline" image of the VM and can restore that to a a VM virtual hard drive, but this is using the Acronis .tib method. You can run Acronis in windows from a VM as well and image the machine that way too, but it's all Acronis .tib files or nothing unless you have .vhd files. 

Now, if you're not actually trying to restore a .vhdx file, but are only trying to select it as a restore destination, have you mounted it before Acronis was launched?  Make sure it shows up in Windows before launching Acronis.  You won't be able to do a disk/partition restore to a mounted .vhdx because disk/paritions restores, will need to reboot the PC first and then launch the linux Acronis environment (same as using your boot media), which means the .vhdx won't be mounted anymore either. 

The work-a-round is to mount another virtual hard disk in the VM (so that the VM sees it as a physical hard drive), boot to your .iso recovery media file (virtual CD rom) and from there, restore to the second virtual hard drive (as it is acting like a physical drive to the VM bios).

Thanks again bobbo. Because I am new to this some of what you've written isn't clear to me, mainly your second paragraph. I don't know what the .tib method is, for instance.

What I'm trying to do it to test the idea that at need a backup I've made of my main workstation (regular pc not a vm) could be restored to a hyperv vm. If my main workstation fails this will be a faster route to being able to continue to do my daily work while I fix or replace the physical workstation.

What I tried to today is essentially this:

On the hyperv server using computer manager I created a vhdx (oops) of the correct size. I formatted that vhdx and then took it offline.

I then created a hyperv vm and attached the bootablemedia iso to it as well as the vhdx I created above.

I put the workstation backup files on to a separate hdd on the hyperv server, took it offline and attached it to the new vm.

Then I booted the new vm. I restored disks 1 (sys reserved) 2 + 3 and the mbr. I then changed the boot order of the hyperv to start with the vhdx hdd first not the acronis iso. But it does not boot from the vhdx - it proceeds to boot from the iso.

Is this because it's vhdx not vhd? I expected to also need to run the acronis universal restore after the main restore operation, but wanted to see if it'd boot as-is before I did that. Is it not working because of the vhdx format? IOW I'm not sure #1 if my basic process is ok #2 if the fail to boot from vhdx is due to vhdx format, or due to not having run the acronis universal restore.

Acronis takes backups and stores them in a proprietary .tib format (True Image Backup).  Once you have a .tib backup of a system disk, you can use the offline recocvery media (mount the .iso of the bootable recovery disk in the virtual CD room and set it to the first boot priority).  You can then do a recovery of the disk using the .tib you previously created and restore that to the same virtual hard disk or create a new virtual hard disk and restore to that instead. 

No, I don't think that the issue is with .vhdx in this case as long as you've made a full Acronis backup (.tib files) of the original system already.  "I put the workstation backup files on to a separate hdd on the hyperv server, took it offline and attached it to the new vm." 

A few things that might get you after a recovery though:

1) What is the boot priority of the bios in the VM now - make sure to take the original OS drive offline (you don't want to have 2 "same" OS in the bios at the same time.  You want to make sure your newly restored disk is set to boot priority #1 now.

2) When restoring to VM's I have had a little issue with the bios detecting the Windows boot manager on the restored disk in some occassions.  you can try to mount a Windows installer and try a start-up repair and see if it sorts it out on it's own.  If not, I've been able to use the command line of the Windows OS installer to repair the BCD entries in some cases.  In other cases, I've had to use these instructions and delete the MBR and then do startup repair using these instructions.. https://www.cult-of-tech.net/2015/07/rebuilding-the-windows-system-reserved-partition/  VM's are a little more trickly because they hardware is all virtual, but also relies on the physical hardware of the system.  

There are other specific VM vesion of Acronis that may do this better, but I've never personally tried them as I've been able to get True Image Home to work on my Windows systems (all desktop versions though).

http://www.acronis.com/en-us/business/backup/virtual-machine/

and/or

http://www.acronis.com/en-us/business/enterprise-solutions/virtual-machine-backup-recovery/

It is set to boot from the 'restored' vhdx first; but it skips over it for whatever reason. I have never restore ati on a physical box, so have limited experience. But what I expected is that the vhdx would try to boot, and probably fail; and I'd fix that with the universal restore iso.

I will see if a windows 7 os installer wants to repair the 'disk'.

Note: there is not original os on the vhdx. It was created via windows 2012 disk manager as an emtpy vhdx, then formatted, taken offline, and mounted in the vm.

I am using the same PC (hardware) for a test I just ran, but I took a full offline image of my physical computer and saved it to an externally attached USB 3.0 hard drive.  OS image was taken of my primary computer running  Windows 10 x64 Pro 1607 v. 14393.321

I created a new VM in VMWorkstation 12 with a blank virtual hard drive of 100Gb (my image is roughly 70Gb when recovered).  I also made sure that in VMWare I selected that it be a UEFI install.  

I mounted the default Linux .iso of Acronis 2017 5554 and booted to that in the VM environment.  I restored the image I just took to the virtual disk.  Upon deploying the mage, I shutdown the VM and detached the Acronis recovery media virtual .iso and checked the bios to make sure the sytem was set to boot to the virutal hard drive of the newly deployed image.  

I started the VM and Windows spinning circle started, said "please wait while configuring devices" and about 2 minutes later, the VM was at the logon screen.  I logged in and everything is good to go, excpet that Windows is not activated (which was expected since Windows 10 was not activated in this VM previuosly and my system was an upgrade install of Windows 10 that is tied to the physcial hardware of the computer).  

I may try virtualbox later on, but I know that VMWare is capable of doing this. 

Maybe windows 2012 r2 is different enough so that your successful restores to vm don't light the way fully for hyperv.

There are too many parts of this that I don't understand. Example: you said and I've read elsewhere that I should make sure EUFI boot is enabled. Another thing that is said is that vhd is supported by acronis but vhdx is not. But with windows 2012 r2, vhdx IS the EUFI format. This is totally confusing...

This can't be the first time someone has tried to restore a tib on hyperv...right? I guess acronis support does not check in here.

Now I've added a windows 7 iso so that it's first in the boot order for the vm. It just says 'starting windows', for an hour now.

I do hope there is some path forward with this...I didn't expect this to be such an ordeal. If anyone has been able to restore a tib to a hyperv vm I'd sure like to hear about it.

"Another thing that is said is that vhd is supported by acronis but vhdx is not. But with windows 2012 r2, vhdx IS the EUFI format. This is totally confusing..."

I think I confused things more with what I wrote.  In Acronis, you used to be able to restore a .vhd backup (Windows image) directly in Acronis.  However, you cannot restore a .vhdx backup (Windows image) directly in Acronis anymore.  This should have no bearing on the restore of an image to a .vhdx virtual hard drive (I'm guessing - vmware uses vmdk and I can restore to that and be bootable within a matter of minutes).

"Now I've added a windows 7 iso so that it's first in the boot order for the vm. It just says 'starting windows', for an hour now."

Are you talking about an installer .iso?  Is that not booting either?  A Windows 7 bootable installer .iso should be completely seperate from Acronis media so if it's not booting, I'm guessing that the bios settings in the vm are preventing it from loading (secure boot, UEFI/legacy compatiblity, a bad .iso ?) Is it sayin g"starting windows' because it can't boot the .iso or has it finally detected the recovered image to the .vhdx and that's where it's stuck? 

Thanks for that clarification re vhdx - now it makes sense.

The windows 7 iso is just windows 7. The idea you'd suggested was to see if windows would attempt to repair the boot sector or something of that order. But all it does is to seeming start the normal boot of windows; and then it stays on 'starting windows' forever. I had guessed that it would detect a fault in the MBR or something offere to repair windows...it does not do that.

It is possible that I could get it to work via the Oct 16 post of your where you list more in depth options, the items in your paragraph which starts with 2). But it's seeming rather a tough battle. I thought this would be a rather mundance operation.

I did a test restore of the backup to a physical box with the same backup files and it went smoothly, that's something at least.

Thanks a ton for your help with this!

Sure thing - glad to try and help.  It is sounding a bit more specific to the Virutal environment since you can restore the same image to another piece of hardware.

Just to be sure...

1) Your original OS is UEFI and the SATA mode is AHCI and you have both set in the VM environment as well for this virtual system
 

2) Whe you restored the system backup image to the VM, you made sure to boot it using UEFI as well (from the rescue media - should be a black background with dos-like white letter menus.

3) Did you try to run universal restore on the virtual hard drive where the OS was restored?  I didn't need to in my VMWare test, but I was also restoring it to a VM that was housed on the original hardware it was taken from so that might be why (Windows 10 is also more graceful with driver compatibility than Windows 

If 1-3 are good to go and it's just "stuck", perhaps "format" the .vhdx virtal disk and restore again just to see.  And if it remains the same, then you can try to run bcd repair commands from a Windows 7 installer disk in the advanced commadn prompt and hope that works.

http://www.tomshardware.com/news/win7-windows-7-mbr,10036.html

If not, then the other article takes it a step further by having you format the MBR of the deployed image to force Windows repair to completely re-create it instead of just trying to repair it:

https://www.cult-of-tech.net/2015/07/rebuilding-the-windows-system-reserved-partition/

I have tried to boot to the universal restore iso and after it loads it says cannot find an OS on your machine, which is unexpected.

I think it is true re UEFI and ACHI on the original OS and UEFI on the vm side. I'll double check after this.

Re the UEFI restore, I am not sure. This is a confusing aspect which I have tried to describe before. At the initial stage of the boot to repair media yes it is a black screen with which chars like DOS. I am not sure what it represents. The msg, during the variuos restor attempts, is not always the same but attached is an example. Earlier, to initiate the restore I would have picked option 1. The actual screenshot was after the last restore was completed; I picked c to continue booting and got the second screenshot. All of the later attempts (remove bootable media, boot to universal restore, windows repair) happened after these screens.

After you complete the initial recovery using option 1 you would need to shutdown the machine and reboot into the Universal Restore app if that is then needed. 

The problem with the Recovery Media is that there is no clean way to shutdown the PC unless you tic that option in the recovery setup screen.  If you do not and then once the recovery completes you simply click on the X to close the screen window then this causes reboot of the PC.  Since your recovery media is still attached to the PC then the PC boots back into the recovery media launch screen again.

To cleanly shutdown the Recovery Media after you have used it:

Press and hold Ctrl+Alt+F2

This actiion will display a Linux shell comand window.

At the command prompt type:

poweroff

Press Enter.

PC will then shutdown.

Note: Recovery Media and Universal Restore are two seperate distinct applications.