Flo_Rian

VM machine was acting like the real box, I figured out that I could boot with the directory service restore mode, the box came up in safe mode,.. when I perform a reboot, same like before. so the acronis backup was not fixable then I went back to the windows backup / restore solution, and i found out, that the old and the new machine have to use the same drive mode, when the old drives were in MBR mode, the new have to be either, then you don't get the BIOS / EFI related error when you try to restore. and if your new system needs to have the same drives (size) and the same quantity as well. my restore is still running, but I'm looking forward, now it has to work!! last problem could be a driver issue, but I gave him some drivers at the start of the restore, maybe it works,.. a new install of SBS2011 was also running without drivers except the NIC driver

hello guys first of all, excuse my bad english - I'm an austrian guy this is my worst experience with windows ever!! Thursday night our old server started to lag massive, I made a windows backup and restarted the box,.. and it did not come back up,.. (btw the server is located in our company 100km far from home) Friday morning a worker of mine restarted the box, it came up and my employs could work - meanwhile I organised a new machine and at noon, after everyone went home the last worker did a backup and brought me the machine to my home base. specs of the new machine MSI X99A sli plus 2x samsung 850 pro 256 SSD 32 gb corsair ram corsair water cooling HT 110 ? ZOTAC 980Ti.. (will not stay) be quiet 850W psu the old machine was a HP Z210 i5 workstation... because our two dell power edge were gone some time before... that was a classic "for now" solution on this machine is only a small SQL database running, it does the AD and some file hosting for internal use. not a massive video rendering machine ok lets start with the worse story ever... I came home at 3pm with the new machine and the old box... installed a MSI 210 gforce card instead of the 980Ti, the two ssd's and the ram, hit the power button and baaaaam - nothing happened,.. absolute nothing,.. it took me about an hour to figure out, that the kingston hyper x ram does not work with this MSI sucker,.. so I took some CORSAIR. after hittig the cmos reset and removing the bios battery several times, it post,... YESS after that, i took an USB thumb drive, mounted a SBS2011 installation dvd on it and started the windows recovery process, but then something like "you can't install the recovery because if you boot from a drive which is not tall enough or so or could not be formated" showed up. # BTW I think this is a special issue of the recovery tool from windows, when you boot from a USB drive, it will install the boot partition on this USB drive and wants to install the recovery on this drive too / strange behavior / must be an programming issue. if you start from a DVD it works. I was searching for some DVDs to burn it, but I found none at home / it was around 8pm and no store was open any more,.. then I called my IT support and he told me to install a new SBS2011 on the box and restore in windows,.. another 3 wasted hours.... ok seting up the new sbs tooks 15 min / then I ran into the next bullsh** - did you know that there are only 3 NIC's out there that were not supported by WIN Server 2008 - guess what,.. after searching and trying around several hours I found this solution LINK The MSI X99-A SLI Plus has a Intel I218V ethernet adapter on board,.. awesome! I grabbed a board that has one of the three not suported NICs out there / I should buy a lottery ticket ASAP. now I could set up the new SBS2011 installation, it took more than an hour to install and setup it self,.. during the setup I found a lot of horror stories about using the windows recovery tools with different hardware, and a bunch of people recommended to use acronis - its something between midnight and 1am - I installed the old server and booted,.. it came up like a charm,.. I stopped all services, installed acronis and started a backup / and guess what - error! maybe it was not the best idea to backup a running windows with a 3rd party software, so I made one of this acronis bootable recovery sticks, shut the server down restarted and booted from this stick. There we go - backup started (Y) .. I went out of the room and grab something eatable, when I came back there was only a black screen. But it was still doing something / this was the moment I decided to go to bed, it was about 2 or 3 AM, in the hope that it will finish the backup without a running monitor. 6:30AM After a short night I hard-rebooted the old box, and surprise surprise, the drive which I used to backup was not readable - yess!!! I took a look for the graphics card and found a broken fan - awesome!! After a reboot with the onboard graphics I could perform a full Backup with acronis Then I went to the new server and started the recovery with acronis. In the meantime I drove to my IT dealer to buy a second keyboard an mouse, because it drove me nuts to use one workstation and two servers with only one keyboard and mouse, I also bought some blank dvd's and a new sata to usb 3 converter / because you need to have 5 USB sticks and 3 USB drives to handle a backup with windows.... When I came back it was around 40% - this bootable acronis does not support USB 3.0, so it used to copy 360GB data with 30MB/s when it finished it's backup, the windows boot screen showed up aaaaand,.... BSTC it was something with 0x0000001 or so I think there are drivers missing but hey - now I have blank DVD's - so I can make a SBS 2011 Disc by my own and recover with windows,.. Two minutes later I ran into the next issue,.. You can not recover because the orginal was backuped on a BIOS and now you are using EFI,.. seriously microsoft? I can not transfer my recovery from a BIOS based system to a UEFI driven one? I forgot to tell you guys that you not simply setup a RAID with a MSI BM - it tooks me next to an hour to figure out how to get it done on this crapy piece of SH**! Not like on an ASUS board,.. You have to set the SATA to RAID and restart, then you have to press Strg+I to get into the RAID setup. I was searching direct in the UEFI as you do it on the ASUS boards. I removed the RAID configuration, put all drives to IDE mode, used LEGACY boot and tried my best,.. but I can't switch to "BIOS acceptable mode" for the windows recovery. so here I am - sitting 24h on doing a simple recovery to new hardware and run out of ideas,... during writing here, I setup a VM and trying to recover there, maybe this will work but this can't be true,.. and it would also not be a solution. Why can't you easily recover your data and migrate to a new machine? why microsoft? does anyone have another idea what I could try next? I can not recover with acronis because I run into diver problems / and I found no driver files which I can install with DART, windows recovery or acronis recovery, because they are all packed into *.exe files and you can not install them without booting to your OS - or are I am wrong? I also can not recover with windows because of the BIOS / UEFI issue I have the old server running here, but I don't want to start any experiments on it, because now we see what it can mean when you have a "BACKUP". I'm not sure that it will recover on the old box either. And I don't need my own episode of "all our data is gone" greetings from the other side of the planet