The long path of installing Windows Home Server 2011 under Hyper-V R2

Here is my experience of Windows Home Server 2011 aka Vail installation under Hyper-V R2 server (Core2 Duo E7600, 8GB RAM, 500GB RAID 1 and 3TB RAID5). What could have gone wrong it actually went but let’s go by steps.

1. During file copy at the very beginning I was experiencing couldn’t copy file XY. Problem: corrupt ISO file I was using. Solution: re-download the file.
2. The setup make it further but I started experiencing random reboots and BSODs during install, this time it was happening soon after initial files copy finished. On the bright side I caught few of them and they were mostly mentioning memory corruption. Time for memtest86+ and for RAM test. It turned out that one of four Patriot DDR2 2GB CAS6 memory sticks was bad. Solution: Throw out the problematic stick and run the server with three sticks. Also donated to memtest86+, well deserved.
3. Memory issues were still present during setup. Argh.  Solution: Throw out the third memory stick (they like to work in pair it seems and a pair and a third wheel obviously isn’t something one should use) and replaced it with two older 1GB sticks I had collecting dust.
4. I’ve made it to the step when setup says “Waiting for installation to continue” and shows a marquee progress bar. Except it didn’t finish. Ever. Now what. After peeking into log files located at C:\Users\All Users\Microsoft\Windows Server\Logs I’ve more or less soon understood that it has something to do with the “waiting for a web page to show”. After more digging I’ve found out that there were problems connecting to the internet and the internal web page wasn’t showing. Problem: the network card didn’t get an address from my DHCP for some reason. Solution: I’ve set a fixed IP and DNS records.
   Hint: Type Ctrl+Alt+End to simulate Ctrl+Alt+Del from Hyper-V client. Pick Start Task Manager and File/Run. Run explorer.exe and you can browse around the file system.

It took me a couple of days to make it through but at least I did it. Hura. It took me that much because I was installing on a 1TB VHD disk on a RAID5 array and setup takes time each retry.

So, that’s it. Now it looks fine.