2 replies to this topic

[Ian]

I'm running WHS 2011 as a Hyper-V VM and everything has been fine. This weekend I got a new upgraded hard drive for my laptop and I decided to use WHS to migrate everything to the new drive and avoid a reinstall. However, I quickly found what seems to be a big flaw in 2011. I see no way to create a restore CD/DVD. I only have the option to create restore USB drive. Well, I can't access USB drives from a HyperV VM so this is quite impossible. Is there no way to create a CD? Or perhaps can I create the restore USB drive from a client computer rather than from the server? Have I royally screwed myself by putting WHS2011 on a VM?

Thanks for any help you can provide.

Ian

[pcdoc]

Here is the easiest way. The CD should have come with the software or you can download it from MS if you have a technet account. Attach the drive to a different computer and watch the video. This should work. It is a bit more complicated in VM but this should help.

[timekills]

You can download a trial version of USB over network and create a USB restore key that way. I did this and it worked like a charm. You can run the server part of the software either on the host server or a completely separate workstation and plug the USB into the server software system. Then run the client software on the VM and it sees the USB drive like it was plugged in to the VM.

I created an image of the USB drive after I made it, which I could upload if you really can't do it any other way. Although since I made it on an 8GB drive, I think the image is 8GB since it makes a bit-for-bit image.

*edit*
Plus you can add iTunes devices and hard drives that way. I run iTunes on a VM, use USB-over-Network to remotely plug in my iDevices intitially than synch them wirelessly after that.

*edit 2*
As a compressed file it is 650MB. So you could download and unzip it and restore it to any USB drive 8GB or >.

Now, back to the NBA All-Star game...