How to: Restoring a PC/Laptop using Windows Home Server
One of the laptops suffered a hard disk failure last week, luckily it was part of the backup regime controlled by a Tranquil PC running Windows Home Server.
Although the steps involved in the recovery process are simple. They don’t seem to be documented, so here they are:
1. Get the hardware working again, in this case it involved replacing the HDD in the laptop.
2. Download the latest recovery/boot cd from the Microsoft website. Although you may have a ‘HomePC Restore CD’ folder on your server, unless you know it’s up to date, get the latest from here.
4. Extract the ISO by running the downloaded file and burn the ISO to a CD using your favorite burning software.
5. Open the last good backup for your PC using the WHS Console and copy the folder called ‘Windows Home Server Drivers for Restore’ to the root of a USB stick.
6. Connect the PC/Laptop to an Ethernet network with access to the WHS and boot off the CD you have just created. It will ask for the drivers for your hardware, at this point insert the USB stick and let it scan it.
7. Select the backup you want to restore, if you have put a new HDD in, you will need to create a partition and format it.
8. Let the restore run. A 40Gb disk will take around 20minutes one 1Gbps network.
That should be it, unless you did have to replace the hard disk, in which case you’ll now find the PC/Laptop won’t boot as it doesn’t have a master boot record. The steps to fix this are:
1. Boot the PC/Laptop off an original OS CD e.g. Windows XP and select the recovery console option.
2. Once in the recovery console run ‘FIXMBR’
3. Reboot the PC/Laptop, everything should now be as it was when the last backup was taken.