Recover Assist will not restore to drive

[bsplhcb]

Recover Assist will not let me restore to new hard drive. I made a bootable usb recovery drive and installed a new internal hard drive into the server. Recovery Assist boots fine and finds my backup on another external hard drive, but when I try to restore a message is displayed that "To restore this computer Windows needs to format the drive that Windows Recovery Environment is currently running on....." I have verified in BIOS that the drive is seen and opened the CMD prompt in RA and verified the drive is seen with "wmic logicaldisk get name"

There is another post from robinaccio with same issue, but the thread stops with no resolution.
I am increasingly frustrated with BA and will stop being a partner. The backup worked perfectly on this new server for about 4 weeks then started getting errors and was told of issue and to turn off verification. Then backups became erratic I would get the full then the incrementals would fail. Due to this I have not put the server into production. Now I am trying to restore from a backup when everything was fine to retrace my steps, so to speak and it will NOT restore! No support after normal business hours....

[Stuart]

Hi there,

It's Stuart here from the BackupAssist team, thanks for posting on our forum.

Can you confirm the number of physical disks (including your RA USB drive) on the machine you're currently trying to perform the recovery to is more than the machine that the machine the backup was taken off?

If you have the exact same number of disks connected to the machine, then the Windows Recovery Environment is wanting to format the USB drive as it requires the drive to be able to recover the entire system.

The error you're seeing is coming directly from the Windows Recovery Environment and not RecoverAssist as the Windows Recovery Environment takes charge of the process from point 5 listed on page 11 of the following document https://www.backupassist.com/downloads/v9/system-recovery-userguide.pdf.

Since the Windows Recovery Environment is in play here, the resolutions provided by Microsoft to these types of errors are also applicable when running RecoverAssist.
Typically Microsoft recommend that you use a DVD to boot off instead of a bootable USB drive, if you're wanting to do this all you'd need to do is create the RecoverAssist media onto a DVD and boot from the DVD drive as a priority.

Alternatively, if the number of drives you have on the machine matches the same number as the original configuration (without the RA USB drive) then try to exclude the USB device that you're running RecoverAssist on during the recovery process to see if this helps. A screenshot of the screen where you'd see this:



Also double check that you're booting in the correct format as there are limitations depending on if you're using BIOS or EFI: https://www.backupassist.com/downloads/resources/system-recovery-reference.pdf.

In regards to our support hours, we do have two offices which operate in different time zones which allows 'after hours support' as you've mentioned. Contact details are located on our site at https://www.backupassist.com/support/contact.html.