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Hans05's avatar
Hans05
Level 4
4 years ago

My approximately annual plea to fix this MAJOR flaw

I've reported this issue previously, but just thought I'd try again. This issue is ongoing for several years but nothing ever gets done.

The issue is simply that the screens displayed by the recovery media for System Recovery are UNREADABLE on systems using small, high DPI screens in UEFI mode.

As an example, take a look at this snapshot of the main screen from the System Recovery boot media:

Note how this is completely unusable. There is not even a means of scrolling to the portions that don't fit within the screen. One other thing to note about the screenshot above: As attached in this post, that window may look very large. But the image above is actually greatly magnified. You can get an idea of how small that screen is by looking at the "X" to close the dialog in the upper right and the tip of the mouse pointer at the lower right.

In other words, there are two issue: That screen is extremely tiny and elements simply don't fit properly making the recovery media unusable because you simply cannot navigate it.

I actually ran into a real world situation recently where I need to recover from a backup on my laptop and I simply couldn't do it. I ended up having to install Windows from scratch, install System Recovery, and then mount my backup and recover my data manually. That was very time consuming and would have been so much easier if I could have simply performed an image recovery.

I don't understand why this issue continues to go unresolved for years.

To reproduce the issue, you need the following:

1) A computer that is configured to boot in pure UEFI mode (not BIOS, or UEFI with CSM).
2) A small screen run a high resolution. As an example, a 15-inch laptop screen with a 4k (3840 x 2160) resolution.
3) Veritas System Recovery media running in either the "Typical" or "Advanced" mode (WinRE or WinPE).

I like to report this issue maybe once a year in the hope that one day someone will actually take pity on me and address this issue :-).

Apologies if my tone is a little harsh. It's simply that it gets a little old seeing this same rather high priority issue for years now.

3 Replies

  • Hello,

    Let me check to see if there is anything that can be done about this or whether it is something restricted by the WinPE environment being booted, as mentioned by   a few years ago.

    • Hans05's avatar
      Hans05
      Level 4

      Thanks for looking into this!

      There are certain restrictions imposed by UEFI. For example, the display will run at native resolution only, you can't run a reduced resolution, say for example 1024 x 768.

      However, most software products using WinPE startup / recovery disks have long ago resolved this. It might be interesting to note that Windows Setup itself had problems with properly displaying on high DPI smaller screens a while ago but that has long ago been resolved. So, the short answer it simply this: It absolutely is possible to resolve that issue.

      • P_Jeal's avatar
        P_Jeal
        Moderator

        Hello,

        I have discussed this with our Engineering team and they are willing to look into this. Unfortunately, due to the need for specific equipment to reproduce this, that is not available while currently working remotely, this means that this cannot be investigated until later in the year.

        I will contact you via PM to get details of the exact VSR version and equipment being used, to assist them in their investigations.