Restoring GPT Disk to Incompatible Legacy BIOS System

Challenge

After selecting a restore point during the bare metal restore configuration, the following message pops up:

OS disk in backup uses GPT disk.  This may cause boot issues on BIOS systems.

If this is ignored and the restore process completes, the following may happen when the restored machine boots up:

No boot disk found

or

An operating system wasn’t found

Cause

This warning occurs when the Veeam Bare Metal Recovery environment detects that the machine it is running on currently has a BIOS that is not in UEFI mode, and the backup file attempting to be restored contains GPT formatted disks.

Due to compatibility issues between GPT formatted partitions and legacy BIOS systems, the system with legacy BIOS mode will boot to an operating system using GPT.

Solution

If the machine that the Bare Metal Recovery is being run on can have it's BIOS reconfigured to use (U)EFI instead of legacy BIOS, this warning will not occur. Please first check if the BIOS of the machine you are attempting to restore to can be changed.
 

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If you cannot change the BIOS mode settings, the following steps must be performed.

To resolve the compatibility issues, it is necessary to format the System partition correctly as outlined in the following steps.

1. Boot the Recovery Media.
2. Go to Tools and start command prompt utility.
3. Run the following commands one by one:
 

diskpart

list disk    

select disk 0

clean

convert mbr

create partition primary size=100

select part 1

format fs=ntfs label=”System reserved” quick

active

assign letter=S

exit

Close the command prompt.

4. Start the restore. While allocating the volumes do not delete the system reserved partition.
5. Do not reboot once restore is completed.
6. Go back to Tools > Command Prompt utility.
7. Run the following commands one by one.
 

diskpart

list vol

exit

8. Once you exit the diskpart context, run the following command in the command prompt (in the example below, S: would be the volume letter assigned during step 3 above): 
 

bcdboot C:\Windows /s S: /f ALL

NOTE: The /f switch is only available under a recovery media that was created from Windows 8/Server 2012 and above. 

9. Reboot and start the restored OS.

More Information

If the system does allow for both MBR and GPT partitions, check with your vendor whether this can be changed in the BIOS settings of the system.