[AccessD] Windows Home Server

The Windows Home Server is up.  8-)

I got most of the parts Friday and had already pulled the motherboard and
power supply out.  I purchased an Micro ATX (tiny) AMD motherboard with
built-in video to handle this job.  It accepts 4 DIMMS for up to 8 GBytes,
and had 2 IDE connectors so that it will accept 4 IDE disks, and it has 4
built-in SATA ports for 4 more disks.  And of course it has 4 on-board USB
ports and more on headers on the MB.  BTW, WHS will use drives connected via
USB ports though I did not need to do that. 

I had (2) 120 gb IDE 100 drives and (2) 250 gb SATA drives "laying around"
and ordered (2) 650 gb IDE 100 drives from Frys.com - on special for $110
each.  So I basically ended up with 1.86 terabytes, most provided by the two
new drives, and I still have 2 available drive connectors (SATA).  I had an
existing computer with an "old" 3.0g x64 (single core) AMD processor but it
was a quite nice chassis with TONS of room for disk drives.  So I swapped
out the motherboard and used the X2 AMD that I had laying around.  I had (2)
1 gb DIMMS laying around and ordered 2 more.  

So the WHS has 4 gigs DDR2 ram, an X2 "3800" AMD processor, (6) hard drives
totaling almost 2 tbytes, and a single 1ghz NIC.  I bought the motherboard
for $75, (2) DIMMS for $50, a new 350 watt PS for $40 and (2) hard drives
for $220 (plus shipping on it all) for about $420 shipped to my door.  I
used my existing chassis and (4) existing hard drives I had laying around.
I also used an existing DVD drive, keyboard, mouse and monitor during the
build, which I removed once the system was up and running.

The build went ... well... let's just say it was exciting.  It started off
with the system not turning on at all.  I had apparently hooked up the power
switch and reset switch wrong and once I got that straightened out I could
turn it on and it posted and showed everything in the bios.  I initially
hooked up just the (2) 120 gig drives, and started the install on them
(master / slave on IDE 1).  That is when the excitement began.  It started
the install process and hung... so I rebooted and it picked up where it left
off and hung... so I rebooted and it picked up where it left off and hung...
Eventually it got to where Windows server itself started running and (kinda
sorta) hung...  This time though Windows 2003 was running and I could
Ctl-Alt-Del to get the task manager and see that both cores were running
doing SOMETHING.  

I had a real Windows 2003 desktop at this point so I loaded the driver CD
and installed all of the device drivers.  After that I rebooted and voila,
she started running.  My best guess is that I was supposed to have a
slipstreamed disk with all the drivers on there which would probably have
made the whole "hang / reboot" cycle go away.  Maybe.

Anyway, it works!  I added in the two 250 gb hard drives and started backing
up my computers.  Saturday I got the two 650 gb drives and installed them.
Saturday night I backed up the Dell M90 laptop.  It took about 1.5 hours to
backup ~60 gigs.

Today I restored the Dell M90 laptop to a larger replacement hard disk sent
by Dell because I appear to be having problems with the original hard disk.
The restore also took about 1.5 hours.  

This allowed me to test the restore function.  It went flawlessly, which I
did not understand at first.  After the restore it failed to boot and it
took me a couple of hours of screwing around to discover why.  I had set up
my original disk with two partitions, a small partition for a swap drive and
the rest of the disk in the remaining partition.  When I restored I did not
create the smaller partition.  Apparently I was trying to boot into the
wrong partition when I restored.  

The boot.ini file had:

[boot loader]
timeout=30
default=multi(0)disk(0)rdisk(0)partition(2)\WINDOWS
[operating systems]
multi(0)disk(0)rdisk(0)partition(2)\WINDOWS="Microsoft Windows XP
Professional" /fastdetect /NoExecute=OptOut

but needed 

[boot loader]
timeout=30
default=multi(0)disk(0)rdisk(0)partition(1)\WINDOWS
[operating systems]
multi(0)disk(0)rdisk(0)partition(1)\WINDOWS="Microsoft Windows XP
Professional" /fastdetect /NoExecute=OptOut

And so it was barfing at boot time.  Once I figured that out and edited the
boot ini it booted right up.  So basically I backed up my laptop to Windows
Home Server, changed out the hard drive, and restored to the new hard drive,
with only a single problem caused by a difference in the physical
configuration (my fault really).  To it's credit WHS (at the very end)
offered to let me edit the Boot.Ini file but I didn't realize that I needed
to.

So there you have it.  The OEM package has three disks.  One is for
installing the OS, a second is for installing a "connector software" on each
client machine, and a third is for doing a restore from backup should you
need to do so.  All in all, they all worked flawlessly.

BTW the Windows Home Server Connector software is a little program that
installs on each machine, and then an icon sits in the tool tray at the
bottom right.  Parts of it run as a service, and that allows it to perform
the backup of that machine out to disk on the WHS machine.  That connector
program allows you to see the server itself (though not like a RDT session,
i.e. not the desktop), see how much disk space remains, add users, schedule
backups, cause backups to happen immediately if required, view backups or
restores happening on any machine etc.  Only ONE instance of the visual part
of the connector can run at one time.  IOW if you have it running on one
machine and fire it up on another machine the first gets a message that it
is shutting down (the visual part).  Any backups or restores begin /
continue / end regardless of whether the visual part is running on that
machine.

I have not exercised all parts of the system, but I have done backups /
restores and they ran flawlessly.  

I would give this WHS system 5 stars.  The installation was a heart stopper
but it did proceed with sufficient reboots and in the end the WHS itself
runs great!  I would NOT recommend trying this for anyone not thoroughly
familiar with building machines and installing OSes.  I would highly
recommend WHS itself, buy it prepackaged if you need to.  I now have my
entire network backed up, (2) Windows 2003 servers, (1) Windows XP Pro
"server", and (3) Windows XP Pro laptops.  Every night each machine backs up
automatically and I can verify that the restore works flawlessly, even to
the point of a full "replace the hard drive" restore.

VERY NICE!

John W. Colby
Colby Consulting
www.ColbyConsulting.com