I attended a session on the then in development Windows Home Server during the 2007 MVP Summit. I thought “Why am I here? This doesn’t pertain to a business, just home users. I don’t do homes.” Well, I was wrong. I recently installed 3 Windows Home Servers at one client location. Why? As a backup of their workstations. Their workstations, purchased from their LOB application vendor, have had a tendency to have their hard drives die. Replacing a fully configured hard drive can be a time consuming proposition. Using an imaging program like Acronis or StorageCraft is a bit costly and requires some on going maintenance. Windows Home Server includes a fantastic backup for the connected workstations. We decided to use this. Each Windows Home Server can support up to 10 workstations. They are easy to connect and configure the backups. And quite inexpensive.
One of the owner’s workstation was showing signs of an impending failure. So soon after we installed WHS, we decided it would be a good idea, and test, to replace his hard drive. I did that today. It was really a pretty straight forward process, with a couple of bumps which I’ll describe here. First, the workstation had failed to backup properly to the WHS for the past week. So I tried a manual backup. Fortunately that worked. So I had a very current backup to restore from. Then I physically replaced the hard drive. Next I booted from the WHS Recovery CD that comes with the software package. it whirred a bit then listed some devices that might need drivers, such as the network card and drives. I clicked ‘Continue’ and it tried to find the Windows Home Server. It could not because it didn’t have the drivers for the network card. Great, I thought. Now I have to round up the drivers for the NIC and whatever else. Then I went back to the devices screen and saw a nice little Help link. It told me how I could copy the needed drivers from the backup of that workstation on the WHS server. Cool. I went to another workstation, brought up the WHS console, followed the instructions and copied the Windows Home Server Restore Drivers (or whatever it’s named) folder to a USB jump drive. I went back to the restoring workstation, stuck in the USB drive and tried again. I followed the prompts to scan the USB for the drivers. It found what it needed and proceeded.
Once I connected to the Windows Home Server, it recognized the workstation I should restore. It also gave me the choice to select another workstation. I tried to start the restore. However, since the new drive was unformatted, I had to take care of that first. The restore process gave me the opportunity to prepare the hard drive. There was a button to launch the disk manager. With it I created a partition on the new drive. I wanted to make the new drive the C: drive but it would not let me. The USB Jump drive was still inserted and was occupying the C: drive slot. So I moved the USB to another letter and then created the main drive partition on the C: drive slot. Then I formatted the new drive. This is probably the most time consuming part of the process.
After the format was complete, I was actually able to do the restore. The original drive was 80 GB with about 30 GB used. I was amazed to see that it took less than 20 minutes to completely restore the drive, across a busy network in the middle of the work day. But there was one more bump on the road. Rebooting the workstation resulted in a blinking cursor in the upper left of the screen. It blinked and blinked and blinked, and never even gave me a can’t find boot or anything. I posted my problem to the SBS MVP list and had a number of suggestions. They all centered around using the XP Recovery Console, from the XP installation CD, and issuing a FIX command of some sort. I tried the suggested ones and then tried FIXMBR. THAT did the trick. The system booted and the user later reported that all was working properly as he anxiously got back to his computer.
All in all I am very impressed with the Windows Home Server. It appears extremely simple to use. This simplicity masks the extraordinary things that go on behind the scenes. Although each server will backup as many as 10 workstations, the space on the server is minimal. It currently only takes approximately 114 GB at this point! And each workstation has at least 20 to 30 GB of used space! And there has been a daily backup every evening for the past week plus! Every time I access WHS, I learn something new about it. A nice piece of work!