Create virt-manager instance from ReaR recovery Iso: not a bootable disk

Latest response

OS version: Redhat Enterprise 8.3
virt-manager version: 2.2.1

Recovery on new virt-manager instance was successful but on reboot there was the following message:
Booting from hard Disk...
Boot failed: not a bootable disk

Analysis of XML files looks good as I compared values with other similar resolved cases posted involving the same boot error message.

The same problem is happening with Boxes (State of the art Virtualization) so I must assume it’s a general problem with using ReaR recovery iso image in a virtual instance.

Has anyone tried to boot and recover an ReaR iso image using a virt-manager instance with any success?

Note: xml copy paste as seen below looks cut off and jumbled when viewing but when I edit post I can see the complete file and it’s well formatted?

rhel8.3.xml:

rhel8.3
f3e45d18-bdfc-4e37-8feb-fcfd25ec6b09

4096000
4096000
2

hvm

destroy
restart
destroy

/usr/libexec/qemu-kvm

/dev/urandom

RN
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Responses

SM Guru 7056 points
12 November 2020 6:28 AM

Hello Ron,

Generally, recovering failed systems using ReaR ISO image file is a straight forward process and it works. However, not tried this on virt-manager. Ideally, the image file would have the required disk partition details and layout to build/repair a corrupted system. I'm sure that you would have checked and corrected the available disks for the vm in virt-manager.

RN Community Member 40 points
12 November 2020 6:59 AM

Thank you for quick reply!

It was a bare metal ReaR recovery backup.

Yes I thought about that. I simply configured a disk file device that was larger than the hard disk partition used on the server and hoped ReaR Recover would do its magic?

I guess I will need to configure a raw secondary disk, with exact partition size as original bare metal server, in the virt-manager disk configuration?

RN Community Member 40 points
12 November 2020 7:35 AM

PS: I only tried the Rear “Restore” option at boot. Maybe the other boot option “Automatic Restore” will have better results! I will let you know ...

SM Guru 7056 points
12 November 2020 9:16 AM

Yes. Choose 'Automatic Restore' option and leave the rest to rear to take care. The targeted device/disk should not be of lesser size when compared with system from which the rear recovery image is taken, but it could be larger in size, I guess that is fine. Rear would simply configure the disk partitions as required and do the recovery.

ir. Jan Gerrit Kootstra's picture Guru 12807 points
12 November 2020 9:34 AM

Hello Ron,

Do I understand the scenarion correctly?

Are you trying to restore a bare metal ReaR backup into a Virtual Machine (KVM guest)?

I am afraid you miss the final step to create the correct grub2 configuration, due to the lack of the correct storage drivers.

You may want to run grub2-mkconfig -o /boot/grub.cfg , before the reboot and see if the works without errors.

If it fails, you may want to try "scsi" disks instead of the default "virtio" disks.

just for the sake of argument "virt-manager" instances is not a generic term, for virt-manager is just a tool to manage "KVM-guests"

Regards,

Jan Gerrit