In attempting to resolve a “Copying Prohibited” issue in Media Center, which I will post about next, for the first time I restored a backup of my 7MC via WHS.  Go figure that doing a simple restore wasn’t cut and dry.

When restoring a PC from WHS, the PC’s NIC drivers must be loaded in order for it to see the WHS over the network.  As outlined these procedures, I booted off the WHS restore disk, inserted the USB stick which had the NIC drivers, and clicked “Install Drivers” and Scan buttons to load up the NIC drivers.  Instead of loading up the drivers, the “Install Drivers” window just sat there.  After waiting 30 minutes, I went on to Plan B, which thankfully worked.

Here’s what I had to do (thanks to allaboutbalance.com for the info):

1. Download the Realtek RTL 8168/8111 Family PCI-E Gigabit Ethernet NIC (NDIS 6.0) Vista 32/64 Auto Installation Program (SID:1412122) and store it on a USB Stick
2. Boot off of WHS Restore CD
3. At the “Install Drivers” window, clicked the help hyperlink (I forget the text, but it’s the only hyperlink in the window).  A help webpage appeared.  In that webpage, right click on it and select “View Source”.  This opens Notepad.  In Notepad, click File=>Open, browse to the NIC’s Setup.exe, right-click on it and select “Run as Administrator”.  Go through the NIC Install windows (i.e. Next, Next, Finish).
4. Go through the rest of the restore process (e.g. entering WHS password, selecting backup, selecting drive to restore to, etc.)
5. Success!