Windows VM System Image Recovery

[buriedsunshine]

To preface this post, I'm a complete n00b with type 1 hypervisors so please pardon any mistakes on my first post. I've only been playing around with proxmox for a few months.

I have scoured the forums looking for a guide on how to recover my Windows system image to a Windows VM in proxmox but have not been successful. I would really appreciate a breakdown of how to recover my Windows image in windows VM or at least some resources that I can further look into.

I have a Windows 10 system image of my old PC when it only had Windows installed on it but I've since installed Proxmox 7 and would like to install Windows 10 as a VM in it. Now I have no trouble with installing Windows regularly, I can get all the drivers running, but where I'm stuck is how do I restore my previous system's image? I have tried to use Windows System Image tool and also Macrium Reflect - and failed with both methods.

For the record, I still have my drive with the Windows installation on it and at first I tried to create a Windows VM and passthrough the drive entirely to the VM and boot from it...this also didn't work for me after following a couple posts on the forums.

 

[itNGO]

Hi,
depending on the type of image. Windows Recovery Image? You can boot Win10 from ISO, manual load drivers in setup screen or by using cmd "Shift+F10" and restore that image to the "blank" VM by using recovery option.
With DISM you can inject missing drivers into the installation so that it detects virtual Disks on boot.

 

[buriedsunshine]

Hi,
depending on the type of image. Windows Recovery Image? You can boot Win10 from ISO, manual load drivers in setup screen or by using cmd "Shift+F10" and restore that image to the "blank" VM by using recovery option.
With DISM you can inject missing drivers into the installation so that it detects virtual Disks on boot.

I actually attempted that multiple times. At first I ran into issues where I was booting with SeaBIOS and not with OVMF (UEFI) so I changed that and then finally got to the system image recovery page but midway through loading it froze on a screen saying "Booting from disk" with no way of being able to progress past that.
At this point I tried to just install a clean copy of Windows and then use Macrium Reflect to recover my system image which also resulted in freezing on a similar page.

Earlier I had tried to passthrough my entire Windows drive to the VM but I ran into issues where I would lose connection to my Proxmox host the second I booted my VM with the passed through drive.

 

[buriedsunshine]

Gonna update this post to provide my solution in case it helps anyone else in the future:

If you're trying to recover your Windows installation with a system image recovery onto a fresh Windows VM in Proxmox then this procedure is what worked for me. (The system image was created with the built-in system image creation tool that Windows has and also created using a UEFI boot device and GPT disk).

1. Create your system image with the built-in tool that Windows has and save this system image onto a USB or external drive. Make sure wherever you're saving the system image has enough space for a 1:1 replication.
2. Once your system image is complete, you can plug your USB/external drive into your Proxmox host.
3. Create a storage location in your proxmox setup for where you will install Windows. In my case, I formatted my NVME drive and created an LVM-thin storage from it intending to allocate the entire drive for my Windows VM.
4. Make sure you have Windows ISO and VirtIO Windows drivers ISO uploaded to your proxmox host (for me I saved mine in local/ISO Images if navigating via the GUI).
5. Create a new Windows 10 VM making sure it has the following settings:
- BIOS must be UEFI
- machine type: q35
- network: virtIO
- qemu agent: enabled
- hard disk: when creating the VM add any amount of hard disk space you want (this is later removed)
6. Once your VM is created go to the hardware page of your VM and add your VirtIO ISO for you drivers as a CD/DVD device.
7. Add a hard disk and select the proxmox storage you configured earlier for Windows as a SATA hard disk (changing to SATA is what ended up working for me, I had tried SCSI and adding the drivers many times but it failed every time). Make sure cache is set to writeback.
8. You'll also need to pass the USB drive which stores your system image through to the VM. Add a USB device and passthrough the entire port containing your USB or external drive to the VM.
9. There will be an extra hard disk in the Hardware page (the one we added when creating the VM), this can be removed.
10. You can now start your VM and it should boot to the Windows installation page. At the bottom left click "Repair this PC".
11. Navigate to the System Image Recovery page and it'll likely discover your system image automatically.
12. Now you need to add your drivers. There should be a button to add drivers, scroll to your VirtIO ISO and under the folder virtscsi add the Windows 10 drivers.
13. If you click on "Exclude disks", your disks should now show up. Make sure not to exclude the disk on which you're installing Windows.
14. The system image recovery should now work.

Note that this method for whatever reason did not work when I tried to use SCSI as the hard disk device, hence why I tried it with SATA. I also could not boot upon completion of the system image recovery when I tried to passthrough my entire NVME drive to the VM, hence why I ended up creating an LVM-Thin storage and just adding it as a hard disk. I believe I tried a few other things that didn't work for me as well - but this is what did end up working so I thought it might be helpful to share it.