A local company had an unfortunate incident with their buildings power supply which managed to blow up their server. We had a good Windows Backup of it (2008 SBS) however the USB drive seemed a little iffy.
To get them back online ASAP we decided to restore the backup onto the replacement server as a virtual machine - they already had a spare 2008 R2 licence so we used this as the host OS.
When it came to trying to restore the backup, the external USB drive wouldn't offline - which meant that we couldn't mount it as a virtual drive in the guest. To get around this, we ended up cloning the USB drive to a VHD and then mounting this instead.
All good, except I then discovered that 2008 cannot mount the SCSI drive from the installation area. A lot of digging later I was still with a solution and running out of time.
Eventually, I hit upon the idea of doing it over the network instead (why it didn't come to me sooner I don't know!). So I removed the Virtual Network Adapted, added a Legacy Network Adapter so the guest installer could use it and then shared the VHD on the host which was then access by the guest over the network and restored.
9 hours later (!) and just in time for the next day of trading of the company the restore completed and the server was good to go after a few driver tweaks here and there.
Next time this happens I'll remember to ignore the SCSI option for anything older than Windows 7/2008 R2 and just use a legacy network driver and restore over the network immediately.
To get them back online ASAP we decided to restore the backup onto the replacement server as a virtual machine - they already had a spare 2008 R2 licence so we used this as the host OS.
When it came to trying to restore the backup, the external USB drive wouldn't offline - which meant that we couldn't mount it as a virtual drive in the guest. To get around this, we ended up cloning the USB drive to a VHD and then mounting this instead.
All good, except I then discovered that 2008 cannot mount the SCSI drive from the installation area. A lot of digging later I was still with a solution and running out of time.
Eventually, I hit upon the idea of doing it over the network instead (why it didn't come to me sooner I don't know!). So I removed the Virtual Network Adapted, added a Legacy Network Adapter so the guest installer could use it and then shared the VHD on the host which was then access by the guest over the network and restored.
9 hours later (!) and just in time for the next day of trading of the company the restore completed and the server was good to go after a few driver tweaks here and there.
Next time this happens I'll remember to ignore the SCSI option for anything older than Windows 7/2008 R2 and just use a legacy network driver and restore over the network immediately.
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