Bare Metal Restore: Advanced Partitioning

Topic

This article explains how to work with the Advanced Partitioning schemes available in the Datto USB BMR environment. It assumes that you have already booted the target hardware into the Datto Utilities environment and have begun the restore. For the steps to perform the BMR, refer to the Additional Resources section below, for the backup product used.

Environment

  • Datto SIRIS
  • Datto ALTO
  • Datto Endpoint Backup
  • Datto Endpoint Backup with Disaster Recovery
  • Datto Endpoint Backup for PCs
  • Datto Bare Metal Restore (BMR)

Description

By this point in the process, you should see the Partition Manager environment.
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General Warnings

  • When a partition is too small for the minimum space required the status will show a warning and not allow the user to proceed.
  • When a partition is too large for the size of the disk, the user will be prevented from continuing with a reason explaining why the partition table is not acceptable.
  • When using the Mirroring option (BCDR only), you will not be able to manually partition unless the automatic partition fails. In this situation, you must ensure that the partition is larger than the volume you are restoring to it in order to accommodate the mirrored data.

Linux Partitioning

If you are performing a Bare Metal Restore of a Linux system, keep the following differences in mind while you go through this process:

  • The file system type will be ext2, ext3, ext4, or xfs unless the partition is for swap. You'll need to use manual partitioning to add a swap.
  • If there is only one partition, it will be bootable by default.
  • If there is a separate /boot partition, set it to be bootable, and make sure it is the first partition listed.

Creating an OS partition

Your next steps depend on whether you want your target machine to use Master Boot Record or GUID Partitioning Table (GPT). The advantages of GPT include EFI booting and creating volumes over 2.2 TB in size. Make sure that you have hardware that supports EFI before you choose this option.

IMPORTANT  Any configurations made or accepted in this step will delete existing partitions on the production machine when the changes are committed. The BMR utility will not preserve existing production data.

IMPORTANT  Do not exclude any partitions which reside on a single drive in a multi-partition configuration; doing so will cause all partitions to be erased.

 

Additional Resources