Comments on: Windows Home Server FAIL

By: E. Keith Owens

E. Keith Owens — Wed, 18 May 2011 16:50:38 +0000

Whats more the drivers that WHS automatically extracts from the client PCs and stores with each backup image dont work either not sure why although the restore CD is based on Vista whereas all my PCs are Windows 7 and in the case of the Realtek NIC in my Acer Aspire One netbook even the correct drivers from Acer dont work due to some sort of bug…I sorted out the Aspire One problem a while ago thanks to which pointed me to a suitable generic driver on the Realtek website. Nope…The problem with Intel NIC drivers is that they are bundled in an installer package so you cant just download a few versions and try them out.

By: Pål

Pål — Tue, 15 Jun 2010 06:19:21 +0000

Nice tip. I remember reading something about x-files restore cd earlier, but I had totally forgotten about it when I needed it.

By: Michel

Michel — Tue, 15 Jun 2010 04:35:50 +0000

http://xfiles.breakinghomeserver.com/myfiles/X-Files/ClientRestore/1.2/

Howdy fellow WHS user Drasha have made this CD that contain all your drivers well at least most of them regarding nic at least and others for a PC restore

He have made also available on torrent the X FIles server edition also.

Hope this will help you for your 64 bits problems.

Sincerely

Michel

By: Pål

Pål — Fri, 28 May 2010 19:28:15 +0000

I had problems with the network card (NIC) drivers. This is how I sovled it:
1. Downloaded Windows 2003/XP 32-bit drivers from the manufactures web site
2. The drivers came as an .msi file. I start the setup (run msi file)
3. At the first prompt I open explorer and navigate to my temp folder (normally something like C:\Users\YourUserName\AppData\Local\Temp)
4. Sort by last modified date (descending)
5. Locate the newest folder and this is most likely the contents of the uncompressed msi file
6. After having located the files I copied them to a USB stick and used that from the restore wizard after having booted from the client restore CD.

By: kbreak

kbreak — Wed, 26 May 2010 23:14:03 +0000

Well it would be interesting to know what you did to get it restored, since I’m sitting here with a 64 bit win7 computer and I’m stuck in the same situation and now I’m googling…. and here I am.

back to google.

I wish I never went 64 bit.

By: Pål

Pål — Fri, 23 Apr 2010 20:55:55 +0000

Got up on the wrong side of bed today? I still feel that Microsoft really went wrong on this one. This is a miss of functionality and something that I frankly feel that Microsoft should have remedied by now.

I consider myself quite computer literate and even I had problems. Btw. had to do another full restore today. Windows has this 100 MB “system reserved” partition that is the bootable one. Proved impossible to restore properly and WHS kept giving it a drive letter. In the end I had to set the C: as active, boot from the Windows 7 CD and select “boot repair”.

By: Henk

Henk — Fri, 23 Apr 2010 09:15:12 +0000

I fully agree MS could make the process a little easier, there’s definitely room for improvement. The process for restoring a 64 bit system which requires drivers that are not present on the restore cd is not really straight-forward, especially for consumers that have little or no computer skills. A lot of them will definitely get stuck even after reading the instructions for restore.

However, if you had simply started with reading the instructions on how to restore there would have been only one snag. The whole process would then have cost you an additional 10 to 15 minutes.

Since you did manage to restore the system from a WHS backup in a few hours I wouldn’t really say WHS failed. It did exactly what it promised, after a little (perhaps unexpected) effort you managed to do suucesfully restore the system. IMO even with a few hours of work this beats reinstalling the system from scratch and then trying to recover your data, settings and other customisations.

Pål Andreassen, next time please start with reading the manual, restore, then tell MS what they should/can do to improve the process