My company issued me a new Dell Latitude E6400.  It’s a fine machine, and I like it very much.  Yesterday our system tech hands me the machine brand spanking new with our base company image on it (Windows 7 Enterprise – 64 bit).  My plan was take the image on this machine and copy it to the solid state hard drive that I have in my personal laptop.  I don’t need this Lenovo T61, but it’s got a blazing fast SSD in it and I want to use that – not this old school SATA thing that came w/ my dell.  So my plan was this:

  • Get the machine completely up to date in terms of Windows Updates
  • Install all of the common stuff that I require on all machine.  Basically, all of this stuff, minus the developer tools – this is what I call a “base image” for myself
  • Back up this “base image” to my Windows Home Server – this should give me a restore-able snapshot in time that essentially hardware agnostic.
  • Remove the solid state hard drive from my T61 and install it as my main hard drive on my E6400
  • Restore the base image onto this solid state drive and… presto – new machine running on my solid state hard drive and using my “base image”
  • Install all of my other software, take another backup at that point, and then happily go on about my life

For those of you who are not familiar with Windows Home Server, the above scenario is not magic.  This is a pretty common thing – I’ve done this many times before.

The problem I had today was I could not for the life of me getting the WHS Restore Disk to recognize my network adapter.  I’ve never had this issue before with other machines I’ve restored.  I simply booted up w/ the restore disk, it found the hardware it needed (essentially the NIC and your hard drive(s)) and it just worked.  This time, when I reached the “Detect Hardware” screen, the WHS Restore software couldn’t find my network adapter.  Without connectivity, there’s no way to restore from the WHS.  Luckily, the Restore software gives you the option to insert a USB Flash Drive or Floppy at the Detect Hardware screen.  It will let you provide drivers if you have them.  That’s nice, but you have to find the right drives that will work w/ the Restore software.  I spent several hours last night working on this with no success.  This morning I found the solution.  But first, the things I tried that didn’t work:

  • I put the original hard drive (issued from my company) back in, and cherry picked the drives from C:\Windows, copied them to a USB Flash Drive, rebooted into the Restore software, and let it scan the flash drive.  Result:  Still couldn’t find the NIC
  • With WHS you can “open” an image.  In other words, when I backed up my Dell in bullet 3 above, WHS will let me open this open and copy files from it.  This is a pretty wicked feature.  It essentially creates a mapped drive on the PC you’re using to talk to the WHS, and lets you copy from it.  In my case, it looked like this:
    image 
    So, following the advice in this forum, I tried copying the drivers from this image (because I know those drivers worked w/ this hardware before I got into all this restore stuff).  I did the same copy-to-flash-drive-then-reboot-then-scan-for-drivers dance, the result:  Still couldn’t find the NIC

I gave up for the night.  After a good night’s sleep and mentally shifted back to the basics.  I know the NIC works when running under Window 7 64bit Enterprise.  What’s different now?  Well, it’s not Window 7 64bit Enterprise that’s trying access the NIC, is it?  This is the WHS Restore software.  Ok, what is that?  It’s obviously some tiny little version of Windows.  Then it dawns on me, I’m barking up the wrong tree.  This probably has nothing to do with 64 bit.  I highly doubt this tiny little version of Windows is 64 bit.  It’s most likely a little version of Windows XP if I had to guess.  The Restore disk doesn’t have default drivers for my hardware.  That’s a shame, but it happens from time to time.  And, I’ve been trying to feed this this thing 64 bit drivers, which it doesn’t like.  This forum I referenced early eluded to this a bit by advising to copy both System32 (32 bit drivers) and SysWOW64 (64 bit drivers).  For whatever reason, it didn’t like those drives (32 bit or 64 bit).  I’m guessing it didn’t like them because these are the Windows 7 versions of the drivers.

Here’s what I did to fix this.  According to Dell, my NIC is a Intel 825xx Gigabit Platform LAN Network Device.  I googled around for drivers, and the normal shady sites came up. Then I realized that Dell.com had versions of these drivers for both Win 7 and Win XP/Vista and 32 and 64 bit versions of each.  This supported my theory and made good common sense.  So, I did the following:

I rebooted into the WHS Restore software, let is scan my Flash Drive, and it found one of these drivers!  After loading these drivers it was on my network and it could find my home server.  I’m not sure which driver it ended up loading, but it found one it like and I was able to continue with the restore wizard.  Within 13 minutes, my base image was restored to my solid state hard drive and my company laptop was ready for business.  The problem is solved, but now I’m late for work… gotta get in the shower!

I hope this helps somebody else out there