Bare metal recovery – Element not found (0x80070490)

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.