Sorry, this is long winded and from memory. I had to do a system restore this weekend. It was much more difficult than it needed to be. I didn't mind booting from installation media to get to the repair area, but the options in the restore process were disappointing. The backup wizard has you backup up everything together, system, system state, and data. When trying to restore just the system, there is not an easy option to do so. To restore just the system drive, you have to select"Reformat Drives" to activate the "Exclusions" button. The numbers they assign to drives don't match the actual drive numbers, so it doesn't give the user a lot of confidence. I selected exclusions, and then unchecked the "reformat" option, and then proceeded. That of course instantly started restoring the data drive first. So I had to wait for it to restore the data drive and the system drive, and then I had to restore the data drive back to the most current state. That's a lot of needless work. Some of the articles I read even said stuff like "press the restore system drive only button". That would be great, but it does not exist.
Microsoft, pleas allow us to easily just restore the system drive without reformatting the drive. Drives often have multiple partitions and it is unclear as if the entire drive will be reformatted, or just the partition. If you can restore the whole system (data and system drives) without checking the "reformat" box, then you should be able to just restore the system drive without reformatting it. Also, when it came time to restore the data, I was faced with the same issue, My data restore point for the most current data included the corrupt system, so I only wanted to restore the Data and not the system. Again, I don't want to reformat because the drives are storage pools so I'm nervous about changing anything. I then went back to the now working Server, and started the GUI for Server Backup. I selected Restore Volumes as opposed to Files and Folders as I wanted to restore the entire volume so It wouldn't have any issues with some of the databases on that drive. It prompts your for the source drives you wish to backup from the backup set you selected, and then gives you a place where to restore to. You cannot restore to the same drive that the backup was from, so it is completely useless. I had to then use the files and folders option and cross my fingers. All worked out well, but there was a waste of about 20 hours that I didn't need to do.
In Summary, please add some more options for the restore that do not include reformatting. Test it and make sure it works, and roll it out to all the still active server versions, not just 2019.
Many Thanks, JP