Back in April I had occasion to restore a file from my Windows Home Server. It wasn’t what I would call a ‘user friendly experience’.
Yesterday I was trying out a Windows profile utility and accidentally hosed my own user profile.
I went to the server room and pulled out my Windows Home Server Restore CD. Popped the CD in the drive, rebooted and went through the restore screens. I was taken to a screen that informed me there had been “AN UNKNOWN NETWORK ERROR”. Not too helpful. There was, however, a link to an article #88097. Fortunately I had another computer at hand so I didn’t need to try and run my screwed up computer to access the article.
While I was scanning through the article of troubleshooting suggestions it dawned on me that I had initiated a manual WHS backup on a different computer before I started the restore of my computer. Of course there was no mention in the troubleshooting article related to a backup running at the same time of a restore – nevertheless I decided to kill the backup and try the restore again. After about 10-15 minutes for the backup to actually kill – I tried the restore and now it proceeded without the error. It was late and this was a volume with 70g of data so I went to bed to continue in the morning.
In the morning I saw that the restore had completed. I rebooted the pc and got back to my login prompt. I logged in with my regular login name and GUESS WHAT – I got a message that we CANNOT CONNECT TO THE DOMAIN. I tried logging in with a different domain username and I WAS able to connect to the domain!
Fortunately I have turned into (at least a little) the belt and suspenders guy. I pulled out my Shadow Protect boot cd and did a volume restore of my SHADOW PROTECT backup and now am back in business.
Sure wish I had one of those glowing WHS testimonials that I hear a Microsoft guy give at each of the last couple IT conferences I’ve been to in the last year or so.
Instead I’ve got a testimonial for Storage Craft. Thank you Storage Craft – your product came through for me.
