Data Protection Manager 2012
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.
For a long time we’ve been using the built in features of Windows Server to allow users to recover their own work through the ‘Previous Versions’ tab in Windows Explorer (which works on the Volume Snapshot service) however the long term plan has been to get our DPM 2012 server to do the heavy lifting instead.
When trying to extend the AD schema (as per this Technet Article) we were coming across this error message
Active Directory could not be configured because the Active Directory domain could not be found. Make sure that the domain name is properly constructed. The following example shows a properly constructed domain name: city.corp.company.com
The best fix I have found is to manually extend the schema by copying the EXE that DPM uses to extend the schema right onto your domain controller that runs the Schema Master role and running it there.
In my case that file can be found here C:\Program Files\Microsoft System Center 2012\DPM\DPM\End User Recovery
The screenshots below show how to do this in a little more detail
NB about DFS shares: If you intend on using end user recovery against shares that are using DFS you will need Hotfix KB2466048. Why this is a hotfix and not included with Windows 7 SP1 I do not know – I just hope it comes along in SP2.
On occasion it maybe necessary to forcefully remove a server from the DPM management console. Maybe you have taken the server out of use without first uninstalling the DPM client through the console or have some kind of weird issue with the server you are protecting.
Regardless if you want to force remove a server from the DPM management console it has to be done through good old PowerShell (there is no way in the UI to do this).
The instructions you need to do this are in the screenshot series below
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