Windows Home Server – A user’s Experience

Using Windows Home Server to restore Windows 7

With the public release of Windows 7 beta today, and the beta period lasting until August, there will be many WHS users wondering about compatibility between WHS and Win 7, if you’re going to install Beta software and run it for 8 months you’ll want to be confident that your backup solution is capable of performing a restore if required. As I’ve never actually used the restore function of WHS I figured that I’d kill two birds with one stone and try the restore process on Win 7.

I installed Win 7 build 7000 on an old Shuttle SN41G2, this is very old tech by today’s standards:

• NForce 2 motherboard
• Athlon 2200
• 1Gb RAM
• NVidia GeForce MX440 onboard graphics

Windows 7 runs very well on this hardware, although some of the Aero effects don’t seem to be enabled, probably due to the onboard graphics not supporting DirectX 9 (not even sure it supports v8).

The first thing I did was to browse to my WHS home page, when you do this with a networked PC that does not have the WHS connector installed you are directed to install the Connector from your server, I did this and the Connector installed with no issues. I then performed a manual backup, which worked without any issues. After backing up Win 7 I logged onto WHS via the console and noticed that it’s listed as “Windows Vista Ultimate Edition”.

I then turned off the PC, placed the WHS restore CD in the drive and booted, I then simply followed the prompts (see images below). The one issue I knew I would have would be due to the lack of certified Vista drivers for my PCs network card. I was prompted to insert a USB stick or floppy with the relevant drivers, I did this and then the restore continued. I was then prompted for my WHS password, and then asked which PC I wanted to restore (the default was This PC, i.e. Win 7). In all the restore took about 40 mins, it would have been quicker but I’m using 100mbit LAN. Then it was done, I rebooted and Win 7 was back. As far as I can tell there have been no issues at all.