Restored 64-bit Windows 7 Beta from Windows Home Server Backup on a DELL Laptop

The HD of the new DELL Precision M4400 I have crashed, burned and died yesterday. I heard the screams 3 rooms away while drinking my morning coffee. It was horrific.

Luckily it was powered on during the night, so the Windows Home Server (WHS) had a full backup. Had a few probs though:

- the recovery cd didn’t have network drivers for my LAN card

- the drivers stored in the special folder on the backup were 64-bit, which isn’t supported by the recovery cd (DUH!!)

- had to download 32-bit drivers from DELL and put on USB drive

Tip: make sure your c-drive matches the size of the backup, and create a “dummy” FAT recovery partition on your new HD which mimics the DELL RECOVERY partition. Also, make sure your USB drive is disconnected once you don’t need it anymore. Make sure it’s disconnected before you finish the backup. Also, eject the recovery cd when rebooting, just to be sure! I had to do the restore 3 times before it managed to make my c-drive bootable! Quite annoying…