Unable to Install Windows Home Server Connector Software on Windows 7 with “The password is incorrect” error message

I ran into an issue today with a computer I brought back to life with a new power supply.  It would not connect to the home server and kept saying the password was incorrect.  After numerous searching I found the answer here under one of the more recent threads. 

To Resolve My Issue

• Start –> type secpol.msc in the Search Box and click the magnifying glass
• Select Local Policies –> Security Options –> Network Security: LAN Manager Authentication level
• Change the setting to Send NTLM response only 

• Save
• Restart the machine
• Attempt the installation again.

This fix seems to apply to Windows 7 only but may work for Vista as well. 

Hyper V – Windows Home Server Update

Well the setup I have with Windows Home Server in a Hyper VM is going better than I could have imagined (please knock on wood as you read this).  It has currently been running for almost a month with no glitches.

I have installed ORB and Verizon Media Manager on the Home Server so I can stream items to my home DVR’s and my Mobile Phone.  The quality has been great with it.  Between this and the addition of Verizon FIOS Internet (25/15) and TV (HD is awesome) my media quality has improved greatly. 

Windows Home Server Backup to the Rescue!!!

Well one week into using Windows Home Server(WHS) and it has saved me some serious time.  I performed my first full system backup of my primary machine at home less than a week ago (Sunday to be exact) since it was so easy to do with WHS.  I did it because my system drive (which is part of raid set) was down to one hard drive as one failed.  Today while working a got the infamous blue screen of death and on reboot – a big fat red warning message telling me that my System RAID array failed.

Great.  What next.  Ah yes – I have a back up.  But how do I restore it?  A quick search on the internet revealed the WHS restoration disk.  So I download it, burn it to a CD, replace the bad hard drive with a set of 250′s sitting in the closet and power up the machine.

1.  A prompt asking me how much system memory I have (less than 512 or more than 512).  This is OK but – why didn’t it already know this??? So I select > 512

2.  It then searches for a Home Server and asks me for my password -  I enter it

3.  A screen pops up asking me what machine I want to restore.  Sure enough my machine is in the list.  I select it and then go to the next screen.

4.  Problem – I can’t see my new drives.  But – there is an advanced disk manager so I click it.

5.  I use this to make partitions and such – Good to go – click next

6.  Now I have to map my drives from the backup to the physical drives.  The only gotcha here is that 100mb system partition created with Vista and Windows 7.  Make sure you create one of these – or go back and run disk mgr again.

7.  I map them -and click next – it’s off to the races restoring the backup.  It completes in less than an hour restoring 65 Gig worth of data (on a gb network).

8.  I restart the machine – everything is great.

So failure to back up and running in 90 minutes.  Half of which was spent deciding what to do and getting the software.  Now my only problem is getting these hard drives back to SeaGate for replacement.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Setting up Windows Home Server in a VM on Win 2008 R2

I have been running Windows 2008 and Hyper V since the day it was released.  It has been very solid and worked well for my needs.  I have now decided to use Windows Home Server for the media and family capabilities it provides. I had some decisions to make and hardware played a factor.  The server I am running is a custom built PC with plenty of power.  It used to run 5 virtual machines (Servers) so I am looking forward to the speed it should provide.

Server Specifications (Hardware)

• Antec P180 Case with 5 120 MM fans (yes it’s quiet too)
• ThermalTake 600W PS
• Intel Core 2 DUO E6600 Processor
• Asus P5B Premium Motherboard with Dual OnBoard Gigabit NIC’s
• 8 Gigs of DDR 800 RAM
• 2 x 320 gig SATA 2 Seagate Hard Drives (Raid 1 for System Partition)
• 4 x 640 gig SATA2 WD Hard Drives
• 2 x 500 gig USB Seagate External Hard Drives

Whew – that’s almost 4 TB of storage space.  This should be sufficient.

Options

I have narrowed down my choices to the following two options.

1. Install Windows Home Server directly on the Hardware
2. Install Windows Server 2008 R2 x64 with Hyper V on the hardware and run Windows Home Server in a VM

I decided to go with option 2 for since WHS is 32 bit only and has a 4 gig Memory limit, is based on Windows 2003, and may limit the future expansion of the server with other virtualization needs.

Setup

Below are the main steps I took to implement the above mentioned scenario.

Install Base Operating System

1. Installed Windows Server 2008 R2 Enterprise Edition
2. Setup all of the network and machine name information (no domain) – turn off TCP Offload
3. Updated the drivers on the system to the latest
4. Updated the system to the latest
5. Setup Hard Drive Configuration
   1. System Drive (80 gig partition on the 320 Raid Set)
   2. VM Host Drive(220 gig partition on the 320 Raid Set)
   3. 4 600 gig partitions for each of the 4 data drives (labeled Storage 1, 2, 3, 4)
   4. The 2 USB drives will be used as backup drives only
6. Added the Hyper V Role to the server (dedicated one of the NIC’s to Hyper V)
7. Made other personalized configurations

Drive Letter	Size	Name	Usage
c	80	System	Host OS Drive
d	220	VM	VM OS Location
e	600	Storage1	VHD Storage Location
f	600	Storage2	VHD Storage Location
g	600	Storage3	VHD Storage Location
h	600	Storage4	VHD Storage Location
m	500	USBStorage1	External USB Storage (backup)
n	500	USBStorage2	External USB Storage (backup)

Note:  Have to say I am pleased to see R2 has a newer interface similar to Win 7.  Pretty nice.

Additional:  Anti Virus for Windows 2008 R2 was hard to find.  I didn’t want to pay hundreds of dollars for a server grade license.  I use NOD32 4.0 Personal edition so that didn’t work either.  After a while of searching I found ClamWin.  This is an open source AV project that does work with 2008 R2.  The link is here: ClamWin Free Antivirus

Setup Windows Home Server in a Virtual Machine

Note: During the initial setup the UI response was slow in the VM.

1. Launch the Hyper V Management Console
2. Create a new virtual machine with the following configuration
   1. 3072 MB ram
   2. 100 Gig VHD on the D: drive
   3. Virtual Processors – 2
   4. Automatic Start Action – Always start this virtual machine automatically
   5. Automatic Stop Action – Save the virtual machine state (this should provide for quicker restarts, start ups)
3. Install WHS in the VM (from ISO if possible – faster install) – I have a folder on the D drive with OS images in it for any virtual machine I am using.  This makes for easier maintenance down the road.
4. After about an hour and a quite a few reboots we finally have a desktop
5. Turn off TCP Offload for the VM network adapter
6. Update time.  It appears there are close to a 100 updates (including the 3.5 sp1 framework).
7. Install Antivirus.  Going with ClamWin here too.
8. Shutdown the VM and added (2) 590 gig virtual drives and (2) 500 gig virtual drives to the Virtual Machine (Storing 1 on each of the physical drives listed above (e-h).
9. Started VM up and added the 4 drives to the server storage using the Windows Home Server Console
10. Once this was completed I was showing 2.2 TB free storage space
11. I setup some user accounts and the shared folders (setting the duplication option for critical files
12. I copied the original data from external drives back to the server
13. I then installed the connector server on my home pc’s.

I have the 2 500 gig USB externals.  I am not sure how I am going to implement those at the time of this writing.  They will be used for backup – just not sure if it will be connected directly to the VM or to the host system.

** Update

For the external USB drives I added them to the host OS (500 gigs each) and created a 300 gig virtual drive on each one.  I set these up in Windows Home Server as drives to backup WHS to.  Now I have a backup that backups up the main shares from the main disk array to the USB drives.

I also installed IDrive online backup in WHS via the desktop and have it backing up the main shares (accessible directly through windows explorer) that I need offsite.

All in all I am pleased with the quality and thought put into this product (WHS).  It seems very user friendly and most of all – functional.