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CloudBerry to EC2 or Azure with UEFI

We're having a heckuva time getting a Cloudberry image backup to restore as a virtual image to either EC2 or Azure because they both tell us they are not compatible with that.

We've turned off UEFI in our CMOS, but then our Windows 10 computer will no longer even boot; it gives us an error about checking the boot sequence.

Is it correct that neither of those services can restore an image we create if our computer is using UEFI? Got a workaround?

SOLUTION

David Johnson, CD

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Anton E

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K A

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Thanks David Johnson, we looked in CMOS to try to change the boot sequence, but it was already "Hard Disk" 1st, and we didn't see anything about Microsoft Boot Manager... and why would we see anything about Microsoft in CMOS?

And thanks Anton E for confirming what we are learning to be true.

So... we're still having a hard time getting off of square one.

We're trying to virtualize these machines in either AWS or Azure:

Windows Server 2008 (We tried this using Cloudberry to AWS, but AWS gave us a message about not being able to restore a partition (?), and CLoudberry suggested we restore partition-by-partition (?). Really? But we're trying to get an entire image, not pieces...?)

Windows Server 2012 R2 (This one is fairly large, so we haven't gone all the way through with it yet... Should we use its Hyper-V or Cloudberry's image backup then send it to AWS or Azure? Because of its size, we'd like to ship somebody a disk and let them load it instead of us using the internet. Will AWS and/or Azure do this?

Windows 10 (this machine had its Windows installed with UEFI enabled, and now whenever we try to disable UEFI, we can't boot up Windows 10. And Azure tells us we cannot load a Windows 10 virtual in Azure.

What about VMWare? About 5 years ago, we created a VMWare image of Server 2003 using (sorry I've forgotten the exact name, but it was a free utility), and ran it on a Windows 7 laptop for about 2 months. Worked great.

Frankly, we'd like to get all this working using Cloudberry, but we've been unable to piece together enough back-and-forth emails to get the job done. We could save SO MUCH TIME if we could get a voice on the line...

SOLUTION

Mukul Singh

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K A

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So... after days of working with this UEFI computer, it appears to me that we're just not going to be able to create a virtual of it. I'm thinking the next thing is to re-format this machine as non-UEFI, but that seems awfully drastic.

BUT... we've even tried to use Sysinternal's Disk2VHD and use this machine's own Hyper-V to create a virtual of itself, and we're still getting nowhere.

Should we just give up and re-format? Would anyone care to step up, get on the phone with us, connect remotely, and give it a go?

K A

ASKER

Thanks, all... I think we proved EC2 and Azure don't deal with UEFI. It was a time-consuming project.

We are surprised that:

A. EC2 and Azure still don't do this. UEFI has been around a while. Here's an article from 2011: Demystifying UEFI, the long-overdue BIOS replacement

B. UEFI is so ingrained with the entire Windows system, and is so difficult to circumvent once deployed.

We wound up re-formatting, and moving forward with our virtual.

Thanks for all your advice.