Comments on Home Server Hacks: Easily Upgrade your Laptop Hard Drive without Miss...

Just upgraded an IBM R51e Thinkpad tonight from 40...

2009-09-25T01:02:00.112-04:00

Just upgraded an IBM R51e Thinkpad tonight from 40GB to 120GB. Restore ran great until I went to boot the laptop - nothing! Using a Win XP CD, I got into Recovery Console and ran 'fixboot' followed by 'fixmbr'. Laptop now boots perfectly.

I would like to use this procedure but can not get...

2009-09-18T13:07:02.806-04:00

I would like to use this procedure but can not get my Toshiba L305 laptop to find the WHS PC. When the WHS Restore CD installs the laptop drivers, it turns off the NIC card (power lap turns off). I have tried loading Win XP driver for the Realtec NIC via a USB drive but the NIC never powers on. I discovered this problem as I was testing to ensure I could restore my wife's new laptop. I have verified that the procedure works on other PC's backed up by my WHS machine. Any help would be appreciated.

I recently tried this procedure on my laptop. Work...

2009-07-10T17:32:02.717-04:00

I recently tried this procedure on my laptop. Worked like a charm. The only minor minor obstacle I ran into was not having my lan/nic drivers at the ready so therefore the restore setup couldn't see the homeserver. So have drivers on a usb stick and away you go...

Is there any specific reason as to why you ran the...

2009-06-24T09:28:33.965-04:00

Is there any specific reason as to why you ran the backup via the run command instead of right clicking on the WHS tray app and choosing "backup Now"

I know this post is mostly about laptop HD upgrade...

2009-06-24T00:48:38.774-04:00

I know this post is mostly about laptop HD upgrades (I did the same thing with my wife's laptop back in March) and also few days late, but... my WHS runs with a pair of WD Green 1T drives and I really regret having them, as they are slow as molasses in winter. Honestly. Backups and file transfers take forever, not because of any networking issue, but that the drives are turtles.

I would strongly recommend buying the WD Black drives instead - yes, they're about 40% more expensive, but... they're also about twice as fast.

If you have them configured for hardware RAID 5 and have more than 3, the speed benefits of striping (plus parity) across multiple slow drives might make these bearable. But using WHS/Win2003Srv automatic JBOD feature, it's mind-numbingly slow.

I usually just wipe out the "recovery partition" a...

2009-06-19T20:41:46.161-04:00

I usually just wipe out the "recovery partition" and use it for something useful, like more space on drive C: :)

But yes, it is worth mentioning thx.

You forget to mention that Windows Home Server wil...

2009-06-19T20:16:50.576-04:00

You forget to mention that Windows Home Server will not restore the recovery partition that many laptops ship with. These partitions are normally hidden, most laptop owners are unaware of their existance until they replace the drive and find out that the laptop's recovery button no longer works as expected.

When I replace laptop hard drives, I usually use Acronis or the laptop's recovery program to recreate the partitions and restore the hiden partition, then use WHS to restore my latest data to the C drive.

@Richard - Yes, follow the same procedure.

2009-06-19T14:13:11.349-04:00

@Richard - Yes, follow the same procedure.

Would something like this be possible with a deskt...

2009-06-19T11:42:08.090-04:00

Would something like this be possible with a desktop if you upgrade the OS hard drive?