windows home server

Restoring Base Image of my Dell Latitude E6400 from my WHS and NIC driver pangs

kellyb — Tue, 09 Feb 2010 12:49:50 GMT

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:

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:

Downloaded version 9.52.25.2, A02 of the Intel drive from dell

Extracted this install and copied the entire contents to my USB Flash Drive

Downloaded version 9.6.31.0, A02 of the Intel driver the from dell – this is from 2007, but it should be XP friendly (at this point pretty confident that’s what I need to be shooting for to make the WHS Restore software happy)

Similarly, I extracted this install and copied the entire contents to my USB Flash Drive

Afterwards, my Flash drive looked like this:

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

2009 – Base Personal Image

kellyb — Tue, 13 Jan 2009 02:07:07 GMT

Some time ago I wrote a post called Base Personal Image. I wanted to write an update to that, but decided it would be nice to have it in it’s original date for historical purposes. So, I’m writing a new post and stamping it with the year.

Here’s the topology of my setup

The staple of my setup are Windows Live Mesh (this replaced Folder Share for me – now called Windows Live Synch). This is what ties everything together for me.

Core

Windows Vista SP1 with IIS
.NET Framework 1.1, 2.0, 3.5
AVG Free Anti-Virus
7-Zip – the fastest there is
FireFox 3.0
Foxit Reader - stay away from Acrobat... it's a dog
Windows Search 4.0
Google Talk
Office 2007 Ultimate
- Save as PDF add-in for Office
Windows Live Messenger
TeraCopy – RoboCopy-like features from the Windows Shell
Windows Home Server Console – available for download from your Windows Home Server

Power Using

Cropper
Paint.NET
Launchy - this replaced SlickRun for me when Launchy released a plugin model along with a "Runner" plugin (which does just about everything SlickRun does).
Windows 2003 Resource Kit Tools (Robocopy)
TextPad
Notepad2
Sysinternals SuiteDisk
ClipPath
Daemon Tools
Password Agent
WordWeb
Texter - I need to post on this one. This is a niche utility that I don't use all that often, but very nice in certain common situations. It has its quirks though.

Backup and Recovery

Mozy – I use to have Mozy running on all of my machines, but since investing in a Windows Home Server – I only use Mozy at my office
Keep Vault – I use this to backup my entire Windows Home Server
Windows Live Mesh – Mesh runs on all of my machines. I use it to synch a few other things, but I primarily use it to keep my Password Agent password file in synch across all of my machines. This also backs up all of my files to the cloud and makes them web accessible.
Backup Magic – For simple Backup operations

Media and Entertainment

Development

Visual Studio 2005 Team Suite
Visual Studio 2008 Team Suite
ReSharper – Invaluable refactoring tool for Visual Studio
MbUnit
TestDriven.NET
CodeSmith - I barely use this one anymore, but it still makes the list
SQL Server 2008 Developer Edition
.NET Reflector
SnippetCompiler
TortoiseSVN
Subversion
VisualSVN
.NET Memory Profiler – It does everything you could ever want in the world of .NET memory profiling, for a small price tag… and the documentation kicks the shit out of Ants and dotTrace

Family Tech Support

When my family calls with a PC problem, I use CrossLoop (free and usually works) or Copilot (for the rare occasions when CrossLoop won’t connect)

Universal Drivers, Codecs, etc.

TechSmith Screen Capture Codec - commonly used on web screencasts

Windows Home Server and New Router Issues - Cont'd

kellyb — Thu, 18 Dec 2008 13:09:08 GMT

I was able to restore my connectivity to the home server with the step described here. I was then able to connect to all the file shares and perform backups. However, I was still not able to connect to WHS via the Console:

Additional tools exist for troubleshooting these problems. Go download the Windows Home Server Toolkit and install it. Then launch ConnectorTroubleshooter.exe at C:\Program Files\Windows Home Server\Toolkit\

It will give you a nice (ugly) report of issues it detects, with links to MS help documentation:

In my case, when I setup my new router, I did not configure the local domain name on my LAN properly. I learned this lesson a long time ago, but forgot about it. Without a domain name on my router's LAN, DNS requests will be fulfilled by my ISP. Obviously, name resolution performed by my ISP is not going to work for resolving machines on my local LAN. The first link on this problem report reminded me of this:

IP address mismatch

UPnP protocols and name resolution produced different IP addresses for your server.

If your broadband router is configured to use a dynamic DNS (DDNS) service, you may experience name resolution problems with Windows Home Server. To work around this problem, disable DDNS on your router while you install the Windows Home Server Connector software. After you finish installing the Connector, you can enable DDNS again

This may also happen if you use DNS for name resolution on your network and your name query request was resolved by your Internet service provider's (ISP's) DNS server. Your ISP may have a computer with the same name as your home server. If you use a local DNS server for name resolution on your home network, ensure that you have a local domain for your home network and that there is an appropriate address record for your home server. Your home computers should be configured to use this DNS server for name resolution.

http://download.microsoft.com/download/2/7/2/272d0c12-bed8-41bc-a2a5-f55682a63f34/95508.htm

Providing a local domain name on my new router brought my WHS Connector back to life. What's strange about this is I was able to successfully connect to my WHS file shares (by name!), but the Connector wouldn't connect. Odd... In the past when I didn't have this configured correctly, I had no connectivity at all (as logic would suggest)

On the D-Link A3, here's where you do that:

Windows Home Server and New Router Issues

kellyb — Wed, 17 Dec 2008 15:27:03 GMT

I recently scraped this Linksys for this D-Link. That Linksys was one of the early Draft N models, and it was flakey from day one and I should have returned it. I finally had enough, booted it for the D-Link. I’m much happier now. Not sure I’ll ever go back to Linksys.

As soon as I was up and running with my new router I discovered that none of the machines on my network were connected to the WHS even though it appeared to be online and running fine. IP information about the location is baked into each of the client computers that are connecting to the WHS. Obviously with the router switch, the IP to my WHS on my network changed. Hence, the client being unable to connect.

Luckily, MS was smart enough to include a utility for this. One of the client machine on your network (with the WHS Connector installed), navigate to C:\Program Files\Windows Home Server\Discovery.exe and run it.

Discover.exe will scan your network looking for your home server. Here is the flow you’ll go through:

This is repair the client machine to the server and you should be back in business