TPOV

Every once in a while one messes up… Yesterday, late in the evening, it was my turn. I messed up my Vista x64 PC. (Like someone at a large software company, I won’t mention the person or the company by name, once said to me; we can prevent a user from looking stupid, but we cannot prevent him from being stupid.) It came to the point that the installation DVD didn’t even see my restore points and allmost all files were corrupt…

Luckily, the night before my Home Server made a complete backup of my machine. So, for the first time, I popped the Home Server PC Restore CD into my PC and booted from it. Yet, I couldn’t start restoring because the network driver wasn’t found. Since there a nice ‘Help’ feature in the product, I was learned that the drivers can be ‘extracted’ from the backup file, presumably from another PC. So I followed the steps and copied the drivers over to a USB stick.

But then… When the Home Server PC Restore CD ‘scanned’ my USB stick, it found a bunch of drivers (I didn’t specifically need), but NOT the NIC driver. So, still no restore. The driver was on the stick though.

Luckily it didn’t take me long to figure out that the Home Server PC Restore CD is based on the x86 plaform. The drivers that Home Servers keeps track of during a backup are obviously 64 bit drivers (since my Vista PC is an x64 version). I downloaded the x86 drivers from the NIC vendors site and put those on the stick as well… The restore wizard found my NIC… It’s now restoring… Keeping my fingers crossed…

Just remember that you have you 32bit drivers stored on some USB stick, before your x64 machine crashes and you have to restore from your Home Server… I had a second PC, but perhaps you’re not that lucky!