I had a hard drive fail recently in one of the workstations. No big deal, Windows Home Server (WHS) does daily image based backups. You just replace the failed hard drive, boot from a CD, clickidy clack a couple times and voila you're back up and running. That's the idea at least."An unknown network error has occurred during PC Restore". That's the error I kept getting after entering the WHS password during the restore process. After researching the error for a bit, most seem to be related to DHCP issues where a flakey network driver or gimpy router aren't providing an IP address correctly. Usually, copying the correct drivers to a USB drive and providing those during the restore solves the problem. I checked my router's logs and it showed that the client was pulling an IP address, so I knew that couldn't be the issue. Other times, the issue occurs because of the database that you're trying to restore is corrupt. Though in that case, the error manifests itself after the restore process has already started.
Wouldn't it be nice if during the restore there were some simple troubleshooting tools such as Command Prompt or Task Manager to help you find out exactly what's going on? As it turns out, there is. You just have to be really creative to get to them.
Start up the PC restore process. When you see the image above, click on "Show Details".
Now you see this image. Click on "Where can I find drivers for my hardware?".
You should now be seeing a very useless help screen. On the right hand side, amongst the text, give it a right click and "View Source". This opens Notepad. Why do we need this? Because Notepad has a File->Open menu that basically gives us access to Windows Explorer. So do that, hit File->Open, and make sure to change it to view all files instead of only text files. With the Explorer, you can now browse the C:\Windows\System32 folder. Find CMD (the Command Prompt), right click it and Open. Tada! Now we have a basic network troubleshooting tool. Run "ipconfig" to show if you have an IP address, and if so, try to ping some other devices on your network. If you don't have an IP address, you know you've got probably driver or router config issues.
As it turns out, I did have an IP address. What could be my problem then? The next step for me was to make sure I could ping my server. First, I tried pinging the server IP address. That worked fine. Secondly, I thought it might be doing a lookup based on the server's network name instead of it's IP directly. I tried just pinging "Server" and a response from another unknown subnet on the internet came back. Aha! That's not good. My resolution? I just unplugged my modem from the router and tried again. This time it had no choice but to look for "Server" locally on my network and now it responded with the correct IP address and successful pings. I was then able to continue on with the PC restore.
In addition to being able to use the command prompt, you might find it useful to help solve some driver issues. Sometimes the only drivers you find are EXE files that the PC restore process doesn't know how to use. With certain programs, such as Universal Extractor, you can extract the actual drivers files out and put them on a thumb drive, but not always. After you get an explorer window, you can browse to a thumb drive with the drivers on it and you may be able to run the EXE and go through the install.
