Once the restart has completed, open the Dashboard and select the Computers tab where you normally view the computer health states and backups. This will restart all of the Windows Home Server services responsible for running the Dashboard and the Client Computer Backups. Once you’ve found the directory, copy across all of the files I had previously copied from the burnt install of Windows and overwrite any files that it requests. The default location is C:ServerFoldersClient Computer Backups, but I had moved mine to D:ServerFoldersClient Computer Backups. Once a client starts a backup to the server, it creates the new databases and files for the server, ruining the chances of importing the existing structure.įrom the new OS installation, open the directory where the Client Computer Backups live.

The critical thing here is that no clients can start a backup to the server before you complete these steps.

Once installed, Windows Home Server sets up the default shares and folders including the Client Computer Backups. It doesn’t support GPT partitions over 2TB which obviously is an I don’t keep active backups of the Home Server operating system because the Windows Server Backup utility in Windows Server 2008 R2 isn’t that hot. Using a USB attached hard disk, I manually copied out the Client Computer Backups folder, then rebuilt the operating system. I wasn’t concerned about loosing personal data that is stored on a separate RAID volume, but I was concerned about my client backups which were stored on the same volume. Launching the Recovery Console command prompt from the installation media, I tried the good old commands that have served me well in the past for Windows Vista and Windows 7 machines I had to repair, bootrec and bootsec, but nothing worked, so I was left with only one option to re-install the OS. The problem lied in the fact that the server wouldn’t acknowledge that the OS disk was a boot partition, and after leaving it to attempt to repair the boot files by itself, which for the record, I don’t think I’ve ever seen work, I took to it manually. Nothing got me going with ease: Last Known Good Configuration, Safe Mode, nothing. Quite sometime ago (probably about two months now), the primary drive on my Windows Home Server 2011 was giving me issues due to a new device driver I installed.

Windows home server 2011 and raid