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Perform Bare Metal Recovery

Bare Metal Recovery (BMR) is the process of restoring a computer system from "bare metal" including reinstalling the operating system and software applications, and then restoring the data and settings. The BMR process lets you restore a full computer with minimal effort, even to different hardware. BMR is possible because during the block-level backup process, CA ARCserve D2D not only captures the data, but also all information that is related to:

All relevant information that is necessary to perform a complete rebuild of the computer system from "bare metal" is backed up into a series of blocks and stored on the backup location.

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How to: Perform a Bare Metal Recovery

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How to: Perform a Bare Metal Recovery

Before you can perform BMR, you must have:

Dynamic disks are restored at the disk level only. If your data is backed up to a local volume on a dynamic disk, you cannot to restore this dynamic disk during BMR. In this scenario, to restore during BMR you must perform one of the following tasks and then perform BMR from the copied Recovery Point:

Note: If you perform BMR to a dynamic disk, do not perform any pre-BMR disk operations (such as cleaning or deleting volume) or else the presence of the disk may not be recognized.

Regardless of which method you used to create the Boot Kit image, the BMR process is basically the same.

To restore data using bare metal recovery:

  1. Insert the saved Boot Kit image media and boot the computer.

    The BIOS Setup Utility screen is displayed.

  2. From the BIOS Setup Utility screen, select the CD-ROM Drive option to launch the boot process.

    Note: If you are using Windows PE image to perform BMR, select an architecture (x86/x64) and press Enter to continue.

    BMR - Windows Boot Manager Screen

  3. The CA ARCserve D2D language select screen is displayed. Select a language and press "Next" to continue.

    Note: If you perform BMR with a BMR USB stick and a Windows 7/Windows Vista/Windows 2008/Windows 2008 R2 installation media (CD/DVD) not supported with a Multilingual User Interface (MUI), the language select screen is suppressed.

    CA ARCserve D2D Language Select Screen

    The Bare Metal Recovery process is initiated and the initial BMR wizard screen is displayed.

    Bare Metal Recovery - Specify a Type of Recovery dialog.

  4. From the BMR wizard screen, select the type of BMR you want to perform:
  5. Click Next.

    The Select a Recovery Point wizard screen is displayed.

    Bare Metal Recovery - Specify a Recovery Point dialog.

  6. From the Select a Recovery Point wizard screen, select the machine (or volume) which contains recovery points for your backup image.

    CA ARCserve D2D lets you recover from any local drive or from a network share.

  7. If the BMR module cannot detect any local destination volume, the "Select a Folder" dialog automatically displays. Provide the remote share where the backups are residing.

    Bare Metal Recovery - Select a folder dialog.

  8. Select the folder where the recovery points for your backup are stored and click OK. (You can click the arrow icon to validate the connection to the selected location).

    The BMR wizard screen now displays the following information:

    Note: To perform BMR for a UEFI system, you must boot the computer in UEFI mode. BMR does not support restoring a computer with different firmware. To verify that the boot firmware is UEFI and not BIOS, click Utilities, About.

    Bare Metal Recovery - Specify a Recovery Point - information populated.

  9. Select which recovery point to restore.

    The related information for the selected recovery point is displayed (in the lower right pane). This display includes such information as the type of backup that was performed (and saved), the backup destination, and the volumes that were backed up.

    If the recovery point contains encrypted sessions (the recovery point clock icon includes a lock), a password required screen appears. Enter the session password and click OK.

    Bare Metal Recovery - Encryption Password dialog.

    Note: If your machine is a Domain Controller, CA ARCserve D2D supports a nonauthoritative restore of the active directory (AD) database file during BMR. (CA ARCserve D2D does not support restoring MSCS clusters).

  10. Verify the recovery point that you want to restore and click Next.

    A BMR wizard screen is displayed with the available recovery mode options.

    Bare Metal Recovery - Specify a Recovery Mode dialog.

  11. Select the recovery mode.

    The available options are Advanced Mode and Express Mode.

    Default: Express Mode.

    Note: The remainder of this procedure is applicable only if you selected the Advanced Mode and the procedure provides information to guide you through the BMR process.

  12. Click Next.

    The BMR utility starts locating the machine that is going to be recovered and displays the corresponding disk partition information.

    The upper pane shows the disk configuration that you have on the current (target) machine and the lower pane shows the disk partition information that you had on the original (source) machine.

    Important! A red X icon displaying for a source volume in the lower pane indicates that this volume contains system information and has not been assigned (mapped) to the target volume. This system information volume from the source disk must be assigned to the target disk and restored during BMR or the reboot fails.

    Note: If you perform BMR and you restore the system volume to a disk which is not configured as the boot disk, it will fail to boot the machine after BMR is completed. Ensure that you are restoring the system volume to a properly configured boot disk.

    Note: When restoring to another disk/volume, the capacity of new disk/volume must be the same size or larger than original disk/volume. In addition, disk resizing is for basic disks only, and not for dynamic disks.

    Bare Metal Recovery - Adjust Disk Partitions dialog.

  13. If the current disk information you are seeing does not appear correct, you can access the Utilities menu and check for missing drivers.
  14. If necessary, on the target volume pane you can click the Operations drop-down menu to display the available options.

    From this menu, you can reset any existing partitions or you can create new partitions to correspond to the disk partitions on the source volume. (Reset means to reload the source and target disk layout information from the configure file and current OS, and discard any user changed disk layout information).

    Note: When mapping to another disk, the capacity of each mapped target volume must be the same size or larger than the corresponding source volume.

    Bare Metal Recovery - Operations menu.

  15. Click on each target volume and from the pop-up menu, select the Map Volume From option to assign a source volume to this target volume.

    The Select a Basic Source Volume dialog opens.

    Bare Metal Recovery - Select a Basic Source Volume dialog.

  16. From Select a Basic Source Volume dialog, click the drop-down menu and select the available source volume to assign to the selected target volume. Click OK.
  17. When you are sure all volumes that you want to restore and all volumes containing system information are assigned to a target volume, click Next.

    The Submit Disk Changes screen opens, displaying a summary of the selected operations. For each new volume being created, the corresponding information is displayed.

    Bare Metal Recovery - Submit Disk Changes dialog.

  18. When you have verified the summary information is correct, click Submit. (If the information is not correct, click Cancel).

    Note: All operations to the hard drive do not take effect until you submit it.

    On the target machine, the new volumes are created and mapped to the corresponding source machine.

  19. When the changes are completed, click OK.

    The Summary of Restore Settings screen opens, displaying a summary of the volumes that are going to be restored.

    Note: On the bottom of restore summary window, the drive letters listed in "Destination Volume" column are automatically generated from the Windows Preinstallation Environment (WinPE). They can be different from the drive letters listed in "Source Volume" column. However, the data is still restored to proper volume even if drive letters are different.

    Bare Metal Recovery - Summary of Restore Settings dialog.
  20. After you have verified that the summary information is correct, click OK.

    The restore process starts. The BMR wizard screen displays the restore status for each volume.

  21. From the Utilities menu, you can access the BMR Activity Log and you can use the Save option to save the Activity Log.

    By default, the Activity Log is saved to the following location:

    X:\windows\system32\dr\log.

    Note: To avoid getting a Windows-generated error, do not save the Activity Log on your desktop or create a folder on your desktop using the "Save As" option from the BMR Activity Log window.

  22. If you are restoring to dissimilar hardware (the SCSI/FC adapter which used to connect hard drives could have been changed) and no compatible driver is detected in your original system, a "driver injection" page is displayed to allow you to provide drivers for these devices.

    You can browse and select drivers to inject to the recovered system so that even if you are recovering to a machine with dissimilar hardware, you can still bring back the machine after BMR.

  23. When the BMR process is completed, a confirmation notification is displayed.

Notes: After completion of BMR: