DPM cannot browse the contents of the virtual machine on the protected computer <name>. Item level recovery is not supported in the following scenarios.
1. The VHD contains a dynamic disk inside the guest OS.
2. The VHD has no volume.
3. HyperV role is not installed on DPM server.
Please perform a full restore of the virtual machine.
ID: 958
Details: Internal error code: 0x80990A9E
The error is pretty explicit as to the cause of the issue, but what if you're seeing this because the Hyper-V role isn't installed, and the reason it's not installed is because the DPM Server is installed in a Virtual Machine?
When DPM 2010 performs an item level recovery, it actually mounts the VHD from the backup as a mountable file system on the DPM server itself. Unfortunately, Windows Server 2008 (inside a guest) does not provide a way to mount a VHD if you are actually in a VM already, so a virtualized DPM server can’t mount the volume – hence the error.
Fortunately there is a workaround we can use, which is to restore the .VHD as a file then mount it manually using Windows Server 2008 R2 disk management. From there you can browse the contents of the .vhd file system and manually restore your files.
Hope this helps,
J.C. Hornbeck | System Center Knowledge Engineer
