With an HP LX195 (WHS v1), it possible and pretty easy to restore to a directly-attached USB drive.
After literally weeks of fighting with a restore over the network that kept estimating 5-7 days but failing after maybe 4 days, I took the drive out of the PC, used a USB gadget to attach it to the WHS box, ran the restore wizard, and had the full drive
restored in 29 minutes! I expected that I would need to run a startup repair after putting the disk back in the PC, but it booted right up without any further repairs.
The restore wizard on the server is at C:\Program Files\Windows Home Server\clientrestorewizard.exe. There is also a 64-bit version, but the 32-bit version worked for me.
Two tips:
- The Disk Management utility on WHS (aka Server 2003) did not seem able to create partitions of the exact size that I needed to restore on the Windows 7 disk. So I started the restore across the network while the disk was still in the PC, canceled it as
soon as it said "Restoring," and moved the disk to the WHS box. At that point, the partitions were created and ready to go.
- By default, the wizard wants to write the first partition of the backup onto the WHS D: drive. I kinda doubt that would work since D: is in use (it's the WHS's data drive), but don't try it. Just manually assign the backup partitions to the ones belonging
to the USB drive (in my case E:, F:, and G:).
Here's a post with more details:
http://www.wegotserved.com/2009/11/17/how-to-restore-a-client-computer-without-using-the-client-restore-disk/
Not sure why this isn't more widely known but I'm glad to have a restore solution when the network route doesn't want to work.
Mark Berry
MCB Systems
