I have been running my WHS home-made system since the early days in 2007, periodically adding and replacing drives, first 1 TB drives, then 1.5 TB drives and then 2 TB drives, up to some 17 TB now. It ran very fine for my needs during five years, but it
is a bit short on space now and I'd like to replace the smallest drives with 3 TB models now...and it seems that this only feasible, if at all, with Power Pack 3 installed.
Or since I installed WHS five years ago, I never got any update specifically for Home Server. I installed PP1, as it can be downloaded from Microsoft, but PP2, PP3 and more recent updates for WHS are only available through Windows Update and they never
show up when checking updates.
So I looked a bit, even a lot, around, learned that for some obscure reason, my WHS doesn't know that it is a Home Server but thinks it is 'just' a Windows 2003 Small Business Server and thus doesn't really ask for WHS updates. But I didn't find any
other way to correct this misinterpretation but to do a complete server recovery which isn't an option for me at all.
As I have another small WHS system based on a Lenovo D400 and as this system just had some networking hardware troubles, I had to add display, mouse and keyboard to the D400 and completely reinstall its OEM WHS. While I had the two systems at the same location,
I tried to compare both and find out the difference that made the D400 know that it was a Home Server and the other one not.
After a lot of searching I finally stumbled upon a registry key that is responsible for this.
So, although it may be the end of WHS v.1 life, if there is somebody out there who has the same problem with WHS not getting its own updates, there is the solution that did it for me:
- Reboot your WHS machine (to make sure that 'Last Known Good' configuration is the most recent)
- Start Registry Editor (Start - Run... regedit)
- Check \HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\Select for the value of LastKnownGood.
Its value is the number of the ControlSet to edit - so if LastKnownGood is 2, you will next edit ControlSet002
- Open \HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\ControlSet00X\Control\ProductOptions (X being 2 in above example)
- Double-Click the ProductSuite key: on my 'bad' WHS I had the following values:
Small Business
Small Business(Restricted)
Terminal Server
whereas my 'good' D400 WHS had:
Small Business
Small Business(Restricted)
WH Server
Terminal Server
If your WHS misses also <WH Server>, just add it as third row in the ProductSuite key
- Reboot and select "Last Known Good" configuration (F8 key before Windows boots up)
Now Windows Update magically downloads PP1 (if you don't have it yet), then PP2 after reboot, then PP3 after another restart, then 2 or 3 further WHS updates!
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