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WIndows 2008 R2 Restore from Windows Backup Software on new hard drive

Server had a hardware failure that resulted in the RAID set becoming corrupt.  The system now gets a BSOD on startup.  I had been doing nightly backups using the Microsoft Windows Backup utility that is part of 2008 R2.  Before messing with too much recovery options on the RAID set I wanted to see what the status of my backups were as they should be less than 24hrs old.  I installed a new HDD in the server removing the RAID set and booted off of the Win 2008 R2 media.  I go in and choose the Repair option.  If I have the backup media (ext USB drive) connected the system appears to just hang when I choose Repair.  So I restarted and this time did not have the USB drive connected.  Now when I go in to repair I get an error saying it cannot find any backup disks and to insert one.  I go ahead and connect the USB drive and tell it to scan again.  It comes up with a window that says "Scanning for system image disks" with a bar going back and forth.  I have left that for a while and nothing happens.  I went ahead and cancelled that and just loaded Win 2008 R2 on to the drive thinking I would try launching the Recovery from Windows.  When I launched it through Windows it saw the drive but it just hung when scanning it in Windows Backup.  I left it scanning for awhile and finally a popup window came up saying that a recovery window was inactive for 10mins and was canceled.  So I gave up and went ahead and booted again off the CD and I am trying the Repair/Recovery again from the disk.  The system is currently at the "Scanning for system image disks" with the bar going across.  I'm going to leave it running for the rest of the day and check on it first thing in the morning.
So here is my question....  Has anyone had a similar experience?  How long should it take to scan a 2TB ext USB HDD for the image?  It has about 1.4GBs of Backup Data on it.  I did verify that I could access the drive when it was connected and there are recent files on the drive.
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pgm554
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You may not like to hear this ,but that disk is probably not compatible with the windows backup.

You may have the 4k sector issue which would be the problem.

http://gadgets.itwriting.com/998-why-your-new-2tb-or-3tb-drive-will-not-work-with-windows-backup.html

http://social.technet.microsoft.com/wiki/contents/articles/1780.external-backup-drives-compatibility-list.aspx
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Rodney Barnhardt
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The problem is that windows backup saves the backup file as a .vhd ,which is not compatible with anything other than a 512 byte sector drive.

Newer 4k sector drives(advanced format) do not work well if at all with the built in backup.

The fixed this in Server 2012 and W8 with the .vhdx file format,but in the mean time trying to backup anything with other than a 3rd party solution is an adventure and not a job.

The real irony is that very few 3rd party backups are certified with Server 2012(not Acronis,not BE,not Storagecraft).

Way to go MS!
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LiberatingInsight

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I ended up creating a VM on my laptop of Win 2008 R2 and set the Administrator password the same as the server.  When I connected the USB drive then to the VM I could see it.  I then shared the drive on the network.  Next I booted the server off of the CD and launched the restore.  The first time I tried just using the IP address for the path (ie: \\192.168.1.123\e$) and it failed after trying to restore.  I found another post that you have to use a DNS name so I edited my temp DNS server and created an A Record for the VM.  I started the restore again and used \\TempVM\e$ and the restore processed and worked.  I even was able to restore back to a different Hard Drive configuration.  Thank you for the guidance!  Not sure I would have come across this on my own!