More WHS

Update on how the Windows Home Server install went. Not too bad.

I ended up going with a 300Gb drive as my system drive as it is a PATA drive and the 500Gb drive is SATA. Why? I've had so many problems installing stuff onto systems with SATA drives, having to find the correct drivers etc and the old PATA (IDE) drives just work.

Unplugged all drives and plugged in 300Gb system drive. Installed Windows Home Server. It was hands off and it even downloaded some updates (at least thats what it said it was doing). I was surpised to see a Windows Small Business Server screen during the install. I didn't realise that was the underlaying technology but it made me feel somewhat happier to be running it. Vista is still so new, and with the driver problems I've had along with other problems I've heard about I'm not so sure its ready to be a server. Longhorn will hopefully be better, but for now WHS appears to be a modified SBS.

The good news is that plugging in my other drives with data on them did not wipe them. Doing the install wiped the install disk (with plenty of warnings, so that's good). You can log into the server locally and copy the files to the server shares. There is a really nice full screen warning letting you know that traditional windows tools can break WHS.

On another note, while WHS was installing, I took one of my spare drives and tried to install Vista on my recently repaired server. My laptop hasn't been as good in the games department (bit dissapointed there but it's a great laptop for development so oh well) and it just would not install! It's an ASUS motherboard and it recognises the SATA drive but when it begins to expand the files it gets a little way in and then gives an error. Windows XP installs fine so I tried to do an install from within XP and got the same error. Will have to investigate this further. Might have to try a PATA drive and see if that works. No Vista drivers on the ASUS web site but I think that is because Vista already has them??