this confusles me.

 

BIOS and MBR only support disks up to 2.1TB in size. So to use a disk larger than 2.1TB as your system boot disk you need to have an EFI mobo and GPT disk.

 

Well I have it all together and sort of running. Asus drivers don't support WHS so none of them will run. how do I go about fixing this?

 

Huh? WHS is basically windows 7/vista. So any drivers for 7 or vista will work on WHS

 

I read up on the storage solutions for Vail and decided it's not for me as a file server. It's cool in concept as a media server, but RAID is such a gigantic pain in the ass compared to DE that I'll live without it's media serving capabilities.

 

well i had to trick whs into loading 7 drivers on most of the devices. I can't get the USB3 to be supported but its not a big deal since I don't have any usb3 devices anyways. Learning whs is a big step for me since i've been out of a windows environment since xp

 

If you have the .inf or other driver files for USB3 in a folder then you can use device manager, right click on the unknown device and choose update. Then select manual method and it to the folder with the drivers in it and it should see it.

 

Are you using WHS v1 or Vail? WHS v1 is based on Server 2003 which uses XP drivers.

 

vail and it's giving me nothing but problems. Every boot is a different issue. Last night I had it working fine then I boot it this morning and it's giving me blue screens left right and center. I'm going to just put windows 7 on.

 

What are the error messages saying?

 

I can't recall. I'm installing 7 now.

 

So that means you're giving up on WHS?

 

for now, once it's live and supported by the motherboard manufacturer I'll give it another go.

 

I just don't see how a driver will work on 7 but not WHS. They're the same code base. I've installed 7 drivers my hyper-v server 2008 R2 box and they worked fine. When you try WHS again let me know and I'll help you get it working.

I think it's something with the install file not recognizing the WHS OS. I bet turning on compatibility mode for the install file would've fixed it.

 

I have no idea why to be honest. I was getting tons of boot issues for some reason too. 7 is up an running fine. Thanks to that ninite site i'm already up and running movies.

 

What mobo/processor did you end up getting?

 

Asus AMD Zacate one. threw in 4gb's of ram. Scored 3.8 on the windows experience test. not awesome but it does what I need of it and it is absolutely dead silent.

 

WHS Vail has reached RTM stage

 

:crickets:

 

WHS 2011 RTM is now up on MSDN and Technet! Downloading now....

I also ordered another 2TB Black drive. Now that I'm ripping blurays I'm thinking about replacing my two 1.5TB blacks with two more 2TBs. We'll see how the 1.5Tb holds up. I still got 700GB free so I should be fine.

 

What are you using for disk redundancy in WHS 2011? I'm thinking about using Microsoft's built-in software RAID 1, but not sure how well it's going to work. I don't think there's a warning or alert letting me know if disk 1 fails. Also, it won't automatically boot to disk 1 if disk 0 fails.

 

I'm using this.

<object width="640" height="390"><param name="movie" value="http://www.youtube.com/v/rCSNDBZCKmY&hl=en_US&feature=player_embedded&versi on=3"></param><param name="allowFullScreen" value="true"></param><param name="allowScriptAccess" value="always"></param><embed src="http://www.youtube.com/v/rCSNDBZCKmY&hl=en_US&feature=player_embedded&versi on=3" type="application/x-shockwave-flash" allowfullscreen="true" allowScriptAccess="always" width="640" height="390"></embed></object>

http://usingwindowshomeserver.com/20...video-edition/

I'm mirroring my media drive. I have two 1.5tbs so one 1.5tb is mirrored on to the other 1.5tb. Then when my 2Tb drive arrives tomorrow I'll be using the server backup feature of WHS to backup my backups and the WHS OS.

 

Does any other MFG make small home servers besides the two listed here? http://www.microsoft.com/windows/pro...erver/buy.mspx

HP used to make one but looks like they are discontinued?

I'm thinking about either a home server or a NAS. If I went with home server it would need to be small and quiet. I want something that I can put time machine backups on and stream video to a WD TV and maybe iPad.

 

http://www.wegotserved.com/category/...erver-reviews/

 

Well, I wiped out my WHS 2011 install today and got rid of it




















































and replaced it with Windows SBS 2011 Essentials! It's the business version of WHS, I spent the day setting it up. I'm getting rid of my Server 2008 R2 and WHS VMs and replacing them with SBS Essentials. I'm going to be reinstalling exchange 2010 on it in a little bit. My hard drive that had all my exchange data on it died so it needed to be reinstalled and while 2008 R2 Enterprise was cool and all it's a bit overkill for me and I didn't like the two VMs competing for resources and RAM so SBS Essentials is a good combo of both WHS and Server 2008 R2.

I really liked how easy it was to create the domain on SBS Essentials and once you added a PC to it for backup it even added it to the domain for you and once you restarted it offered to transfer data and settings from your Local Account to the new domain account on your PC! Too bad it didn't work for me.....

Other than that it's been great, only feature I lose with the business version is media streaming over the web and network but I never use the web streaming and there's many better alternatives than Windows Media Connect for DLNA streaming. WMC is pretty slow at updating it's library, it can takes hours, days, weeks or years for it to add new media sometimes which is quite frustrating.

 

Stunna (or anyone else who might know),

My son's new PC developed a problem over the weekend, and my first shot at getting it to work was to try and just restore from backup.

The LAN port on his motherboard can be put into a state where it stops working -- which is something I had to update his Win7 drivers to eliminate. Unfortunately, the WHS restore disk has drivers that disable the port.

Is there a way to customize the restore disk to have updated drivers instead of those that were included with the disk image? WHS restore recognizes the LAN port, but won't find the updated drivers on a flash stick so I think my only choices are to disable his on-board LAN and buy another card, or to modify the restore disk.

 

If it doesn't recognize the drivers from the flash drive, IDK what else to do besides use another NIC. they're pretty cheap. I guess if you find where drivers are stored on the restore CD you could rebuild the disc after adding your drivers to the right folder. never done that before though....

 

Yeah I figured it was a long shot. I'll just pony up and buy a NIC.

 

bump for inclusion in teh new forum

 

Thanks dude, I'm going through and moving these threads along with many others. May take a couple days as I go through pages and pages of search results. We've got a lot of tech related threads!

 

I upgraded my Windows Home Server 2011 to Windows Server 2012 Essentials. Problem is after the install, it seems like file copying is really slow (10 MB/s) and the system hangs while copying. I can't do anything else on the server while it's going. This is between 2 internal hard drives, not over the network. Does this seem normal? The hardware isn't the best, but I would think file copying isn't a huge problem. It has a AMD Athlon X2 4450B 2.3GHz, 4 GB memory, and 2 5400 RPM internal SATA hard drives. Would adding memory help?

 

Maybe one of your drives is about to die and you're just noticing it now after the upgrade.

If your drive is failing it may lock up the system while file copying. Check the event viewer for any errors though you may not find any. How old are the drives?

 

Got them December 2009, so almost 3 years. I'll check the logs tonight.

 

yeah that sound like a failing drive to me....

 

Damn, I just replaced a failing drive on another PC few months ago. Is there a way to test for failing drive? I think it's still under warranty so I hope they'll replace it for me.

 

yeah you can go to the manufacturer's website and they'll have drive testing tools but even then that' not guaranteed to tell you it's failing. Drives can pass all tests but still be failing. Though if you do get an error then it's definite. Seagate has SeaTools and WD has Data Lifeguard Tools. They usually like you to run these tools and see if you get an error code before doing an RMA though an error code isn't required to get an RMA.

 

The home server is a really tough environment for hard drives. I've had a number of failures over the years, and unfortunately Drive Extender isn't quite robust enough to guarantee no data loss when a drive fails.

I'm replacing the latest failed drive with a 2TB Seagate Constellation drive that I hope will be more resilient, but I think I will get working on retiring my existing server and replacing it with an updated one based on Windows Server 2012 Essentials and using Storage Spaces.

Is this a good thread for that discussion or should we start a new thread?

 

I tried Server 2012 Essentials, but didn't like how it forced you into a domain environment so I went back to Home Server 2011. I wish they gave you an option of not using a domain.

 

Yeah, the domain thing has me concerned too as I'm not an expert on administering a domain and I have to research the implications for my home environment, which has a mix of Windows 7 (Home, Pro, and Ultimate) and a Macbook along with iPads, iPods, Xbox, and Apple TVs.

I've been thinking maybe going to HS 2011 and using something like Stablebit DrivePool to get around the restrictions on storage that HS 2011 introduced. But I think taking the long view I'd be better off getting on the newer, more flexible, supported server software.

 

This was almost a year ago but I think my main problem was that since it's a domain controller, it has Active Directory, DNS, and DCHP service on it. And I don't run my server 24/7, but with DNS and DCHP it had to be on whenever I had any device on the network.