I’ve recently been testing our disaster recovery abilities particularly in restoring servers from the bare metal recovery feature of System Centre Data Protection Manager 2012.
When restoring one of our servers (that is a virtual machine) I was getting the error message below just before the drive data starts to copy over.
The system image restore failed.
Error details: Element not found. (0x80070490)
As it turns out this error message relates to the restore program not detecting the required number of hard drives attached to the VM that I am restoring the data to.
The fix is simple – assign the extra drives required. The slide show below goes into this in a little more detail.
On further thought I remembered that this particular VM was originally on a physical machine – hence the extra drive came from the tiny partition (usually 100-500MB depending on OS) that Windows creates when doing a first time install that’s used for bitlocker/bootloader stuff. Either way your server won’t work without it and neither will the restore.
Holy. Shit. Just spend 5-6 hours trying to troubleshoot this error when restoring one of my Windows 8 backup images.
At first, I was getting errors about “No disk that can be used for recovering the system disk can be found”. Turns out this was because of my USB card reader. Windows was marking one of these EMPTY (i.e. no card inserted) drives as a system disk. Unplugging the card reader then gave me this very error.
I decided to unplug all my drives, except my OS drive and try a restore. Element not found.
Turns out, when I initially installed Windows 8, it decided to push the EFI partition to one of my data drives. Even though both the DATA drive and OS drive both had EFI partitions, it seems the “Windows 7 File Recovery” backup in Windows 8 decided to image the EFI partition from the data drive. Okay.
So, when restoring the image, it was trying to place the EFI partition on a separate drive. I plugged in a single data drive with my OS drive and surprisingly…it restored.
Thanks,
you finally solve my problems …
Ciao from Italy 🙂
Wow, I have been running into this same issue. Didn’t think that this could be the reason why. Looks like I will be trying this shortly. I will let you know my results.
Sir, Thank you so much for your post. I manage to restore RAID mirror volume . God Bless you !
Exactly the same thing. Tried bigger disks / formatted/un-formatted disks / half installs and like you realised a had an additional data disk. I needed to put in a second drive however the system drive had to be the combined size of the original backed-up devices. In my case that was C: 120GB SSD and D: 250GB so I had to use 1 500GB NEW System Drive.