Cannot boot a generation 2 VM after restoring from backup

Question

Hello everyone

I can't find a way to boot on a generation 2 VM after it was restored from a backup. It makes me really worried since a good part of our VMs are now gen 2 and their backups are basically unusable.

I mostly use Microsoft Azure Backup Server V3 to backup my VMs, but I have the same issue when exporting them directly with the Hyper-V manager. I tried restoring on multple Windows Server 2016 hosts, I tried the 3 Hyper-V restore options in the wizard, I also tried DPM's "restore directly on a virtualization host". I also tried on my Win10 PC running hyper-V.

When booting the VM, I get the following screen. This happens both on VMs running WS2019 and Ubuntu.

One thing I have not tried is restoring on the same physical host that the backup was taken from-- but considering I would want to restore the backups to a different host in case that host stops working, that wouldn't help me much even if it worked.

1. Windows Boot Manager : No UEFI-compatible file system was found.
2. SCSI DVD (0,1) : No UEFI-compatible file system was found.
3. SCSI Disk (0,0) : No UEFI-compatible file system was found.
4. Network Adapter (<mac address>) : The network media is disconnect.

No operating system was loaded. Press a key to retry the boot sequence.
Note: Configuration changes may require the virtual machine to be reset.

I tried disabling Secure Boot in the VM before backing up the machine, and enabling the processor compatibility checkbox so it works on hosts with a different CPU. Creating a new VM and attaching the restored VHDX file didn't work either.

Another solution I found in a youtube video was to boot on a Windows ISO, open the command prompt and do some diskpart, bootrec /fixboot and bcdedit, however I haven't managed to mount the system volume in the recovery command prompt (despite the disk showing up in diskpart).

So far I haven't managed to boot on any restored gen 2 VM and I don't think I would be very inclined to go through very a complicated walkthrough to fix the UEFI boot on my VMs in a disaster recovery scenario, especially when restored gen 1 VM are plug-and-play. Has anyone managed to get around this problem?

Thank you.

Answer 1

Hi,
I’m not sure if this is the cause, but based on my understanding, if you want to use generation 2 VMs, UEFI must be supported.
For your reference:
https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/windows-server/virtualization/hyper-v/plan/should-i-create-a-generation-1-or-2-virtual-machine-in-hyper-v

Thanks for your understanding.
Best regards,
Danny

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Answer 2

Hi,
May I ask if there’s any event logs or error messages related to this issue? If any, you can find them by using event viewer.

Thanks for your time.
Best regards,
Danny

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