Tonight while fooling around with Visual Studio 2010 on my new Lenovo W510 laptop running Windows 7, 64 bit I ended up blue-screening Windows 7. The PC kept blue-screening on every boot attempt and the built-in boot recovery in Windows 7 could not find any problems.

Well, not to fear. I just took a backup, so I’ll simply restore it. Popped the client PC restore CD in the drive and booted.

Snag 1: The network card was not detected. Well I’ve read about that. That’s what the “Windows Home Server Drivers for Restore” folder on the C: drive is for. I opened the backup on another PC and copied the whole folder to a USB thumb drive, the popped it in the PC to be restored and scanned for drivers.

Snag 2: The Lenovo W510 has USB 3 and the bloody thumb drive was not even detected. It seemed I needed to load USB drivers first. Luckily I remembered that the PC has two USB 3 and one USB 2 slots. I inserted the USB drive in the USB 2 slot and again click scan. This time the light on the drive flickered, but it still could not find and drivers. After googleing the web I found the cause.

Snag 3: Since I was running Windows 7 64 bit all the drivers in the “Windows Home Server Drivers for Restore” folder was 64-bit drivers. The bootable client restore CD is running a stripped down version of 32-bit Vista and thus cannot load my 64-bit drivers. I actually need to download 32-bit drivers manually from Lenovo.com.

Snag 4: Drivers usually comes in a nice msi file or setup.exe file. That’s no good. I needed to extract the actual files from within the msi’s. The resulting file’s (.inf, dll’s and more) can then be moved to the USB stick. That’s the whole point of the “Windows Home Server Drivers for Restore” folder. The drivers were supposed to be there “ready for picking”.

Finally after several hours my PC is now back up and running after a restore that should have taken only 30 minutes or so.

Microsoft: You really need to release a 64-bit client restore CD that supports the drivers. This is a major flaw in the way WHS works.

Pimp my Home Server

Just before Christmas 2008 I bought the HP EX475 MediaSmart windows home server. After reading about it before I purchased it I already knew that the puny 512 MB ram that it came with was too little so I already had 2GB ready for installation when the server arrived.

Now a little over six months later the 1TB disks was already over 75% full and I was tired of the underpowered CPU chopping up performance whenever the server tried to do more than one thing at the same time. The server uses AMD AM2 slot CPU’s and I bought a new 2.6 GHz Athlon processor for just over 300 NOK which is a really nice price for a CPU. Following the excellent guide from Home Server Hacks the procedure was quick and painless. Installing a new 1TB disk was also done in a few seconds.

Now my EX475 has 4 times the RAM, 2 times the storage and a CPU that is clocked at 45% higher frequency (but also quadruples the L2 cache) compared to the original. In other words my EX 475 is now more like a EX 485 than the EX475 that it once were.

And to be honest it was needed. If you want to do anything other than sharing documents and backing up PC’s you need to upgrade the RAM and CPU.

Main screen

v1.1.0.0
- Fixed shortcut keys (F5, F6, F8 etc)
- Pattern matching for select and deselect of files
- New dialog for storage information and server uptime
- Revamped user interface to match the Home Server Console style

I’ve implemented the two top features you the users had voted for. Click to read more and download.

The above mentioned guide tells you how to create a new restore DVD from your existing setup so that you can roll back to what ever setup you have now.

Great news for all the HP MediaSmart owners (yes this tip is only for use since it makes use of the built in flash boot that’s in hardware).

New features:
- Support for removable storage (CD, DVD or USB disks that are not part of the storage pool)
- Support for opening files directly via the Home Server Console (files are opened on your local computer and not the server)
- Lots of bug fixes

I am now asking for feedback from the users about what further functions you would like to see in future versions.

Grab it from http://blog.paks.no/2009/03/29/whs-file-manager-add-in/

What about the EX470/EX475?

HP has earlier said that they would also release a software upgrade for the older EX47x series. But they still will not commit to a time line for this release and I’m starting to feel left out in the cold here. Is this yet another case of trying to hold existing customers warm by promises, but in reality they have no plan to actually release anyting, but hope we get tired of waiting that in the end we buy next new shiny device instead?  I’ve been “dumped” by HP, Dell, HTC etc. so many times I cannot count. It’s all a race about pushing new models with new features. You get a few updates in the beginning, but as soon as a newer model is out all but critical updates dry out. That’s a real shame, especially since the models are so similar. It would have been much better for HP to release one set of software for their MediaSmart series and then just disable or give a warning about things the older EX47x series might not be able to handle like the real-time video transcoding.

via:
http://www.mediasmartserver.net/2009/04/12/hp-announces-25-software-update/

Changes in this version

1.0.0.5
- Does no longer show printers as shares
- Made current location of each pane to stand out more (easier to see)
- Made each folder in pane path (above panes) clickable for easy access to
any parent folder
- Fixed problem with caching of exe file icons (all exe files got same icon)
- Added support for sorting by clicking list headers
- Canceling a rename operation (clicking escape) does no longer give an error
- Changed default drag operation from move in 1.0.0.3 to copy.
- Removed a lot of the error messages and instead disable the command buttons when you have not selected and files.

Link to add-in
http://blog.paks.no/2009/03/29/whs-file-manager-add-in/

The configuration software is available in-box on HP’s MediaSmart Server or it can be downloaded from here if you have other brands of Home Server.

This add-in simply starts that configurator from within a Windows Home Server Console Tab and allows you to allow and block access from your home server to various media devices in the home – an Xbox 360 for example.

Released: 2009-04-28
Version: 1.0.0.2

From the main screen you can see which media devices that have tried to connect to your sever. Here you can choose to allow or disallow access from those devices. From the shares screen you can add, edit and remove the folder you want to share. And from the settings screen you can decide if Media Connect is to start up automatically, and if new devices will get approved for access by default or not. Click images to see full size.

Sometimes you need to click the “Media Connect” toolbar multiple times in order to get the application to dock in the WHS console.

License

This Add-In is available free of charge, for all users (private, organizations and companies). You can copy and share the Add-In (in MSI form) for free. The only restriction is that you cannot sell or otherwise charge for the product.

Disclaimer

Any use of this software is on your own risk. We take no responsibility for any problems, data loss, hair loss or otherwise that you might experience.

Prerequisite

Media Connect 2.0 (You probably have this already).

Download

Media Connect Configuration Add-In v1.0.0.2 (24 kB) 1810 downloads

Read post for more information.