After importing my win11 vm backup, volume is shown as empty

[kobold81]

Hello,

what I thought was non-functional passthrough is in reality a problem with my imported volume:

I created a backup of my stopped windows vm (650GB) and copied that to a fileserver. Then I reinstalled proxmox and imported the backup.
Booting failed.

I created a new vm of windows 11 and when I start a new vm of windows and add the disk management utility shows the second hdd of 650GB as "not assigned".

Is there a chance to access the files on that 650GB volume or is all lost?

 

[Bu66as]

Hello @kobold81,

could you please post the configuration file of your VM? You can find it at /etc/pve/qemux-server/VMID.conf (replace VMID with the actual ID of your virtual machine). It's possible that the disk controller type (e.g., SATA, SCSI, VirtIO) has changed after the restore.

 

[kobold81]

Hello @Bu66as,

I found the reason for my trouble and a solution:
The restore-from-backup process did not work on my machine by using the gui.

I decompressed the backup file with

zstd --decompress --stdout vzdump-qemu-100-2025_10_04-17_39_46.vma.zst | vma extract - extrat

and added the volume to my machine with:

 qm disk import 100 tmp-disk-drive-virtio1.raw local-zfs

Then I removed the passthrough pci devices and booted the vm. Then I had to type in the btlocker recovery key and the vm booted normally.

Summary: if gui restore fails, do it manually