At home, I'm using Windows Home Server to store all my videos, photos, music and other content. I'm using it for about half year now and apart from annoying corrupted files bug (which supposed to be fixed in upcoming Power Pack 1), I'm pretty in love with it. Anyway, this is not about WHS and what I like in it, but more about migrating it to a new hardware.
When I got the system first time, I have installed it on my old computer, that was previously hosting Window XP. But the computer is about 7 years old and its getting hard and expensive to find parts for it. So I have decided to get a new inexpensive computer and finally throw out the old one. And here I was not sure on how the migration will work.
First of all - I didn't have much content, all about 200-250 GB, and I had such space on new computer, so I simply copied all content there. Sure it filled up my hard drive, but that was temporary, right? Then I plugged in new computer, with new 500GB disk, pushed WHS installation CD inside and the show began. I was asked at the beginning about preferred keyboard layout and then setup continued so I could return to Everquest II while WHS was installing.
In about hour, I checked what's up with installation and found out that everything was working fine and ready to be used. So I set my administrative password (which BTW is not GOD or SEX or PASSWORD), added my home users using WHS console and was looking for a way to reconnect my client machines to new server. Thus I have found, that simply executing Discovery.exe in "Program Files\Windows Home Server" does the trick and in 10 minutes I have all my clients connected. (See update from June 8). That's it.
P.S. I was also worried about licensing, but when I was prompted to active new WHS, I simply clicked on the balloon and successfully finished activation without any issues.
Updated on June 8, 2008: I was having issues with passwords on my clients - each time server or client machine was rebooted, a balloon was displayed with "Passwords do not match" message. To make sure passwords indeed match, I have completed Update Password wizard, but this didn't help. So I submitted a bug into Microsoft's connect site and received suggestion to uninstall and install again client's software. I have followed it on 2 computers and issue was solved. To conclude - do not use Discovery.exe to connect to new home server. Instead simply reinstall client connector software.
posted @ Friday, June 06, 2008 6:20 PM