Bare Metal Restore (BMR) recoveries to disks using Advanced Format (AF) technology fail to partition the disk.

Problem

Doing a BMR restore to Windows clients that have an Advanced Format (AF) technology disk cannot perform proper partitioning and will fail.

Error Message

Could not create partition Volume6, hr=0x80042554
Could not create partition Volume6, hr=9556
Could not create basic partition, rc=10004

Cause

The Advanced format disk technology makes use of 4K byte size physical blocks on disks, larger than the current standard of 512 byte blocks. The Windows API used to create partitions on these disks fails because of this.  A new different API call is required for the operation. Some vendors make use of a 512 byte emulation mode ( 512e) using disk firmware, but that still does not allow the use of the older API call for the partitioning.  The error is seen when the drive is attached to a native SATA adapter port. This problem is not seen when the drive is attached to a SAS/SATA RAID adapter, such as the Dell PERC/6 or the IBM ServRAID adapters.

Solution

At this time BMR does not support restoring back to Advanced Format (AF) disks.  Replace the disk with a non-AF style disk for the recovery.

An EEB fix is available at release 7.6.0.3. An enhancement to the BMR product is planned in a future release to support AF disk recoveries.

A fix at release 7.5.0.X or earlier will not be available.


Veritas Corporation has acknowledged that the above-mentioned issue (ETrack 3300570) is present in the current version(s) of the product(s) mentioned in this article. Veritas Corporation is committed to product quality and satisfied customers. This issue was scheduled to be addressed in the following release(s):

NetBackup 7.6.1 Maintenance Update 1 (7.6.1.1) 

When released, please visit this link for download and README information:
https://www.veritas.com/content/support/en_US/15143.html  (for NetBackup Enterprise Server)
https://www.veritas.com/content/support/en_US/58991.html  (for NetBackup Appliances)

Applies To

All supported Windows clients and all current versions of BMR.