Windows Home server Expired......now what

Vampirrella

Golden Member
Apr 5, 2001
1,211
0
71
I installed the trial WHS back in october to try it out. I moved a bunch of data over thinking I would like to keep using WHS after the 30 day period.

Things got hectic in Nov with work ect and I had not turned on the WHS box in a while totally forgetting about the WHS trial thing. Now when I turn it on, it keeps saying WHS expired but when I click on activate, the box just flashes and dissapears leaving me at the login screen over and over again.

I thought I would then remove the HDD and hook it up to my win7 machine and simply copy over all the folders from the WHS drive but every file says "the file is inaccessable" I am logged in as administrator

How on earth can I remove all my data off the WHS drive without losing it? Even if after the trial I decided to NOT use WHS, to not be able to retrieve the data on the HDD is just bad practice by MS.

Any ideas on how to remove the data off the old WHS drive would be most appreciated!

Thanks!
 

JackMDS

Elite Member
Super Moderator
Oct 25, 1999
29,485
391
126
When you install WHS it partition the main Disk to two.

20GB for the OS and the rest fir data.

When you upgrade to the OEM version it does not touch the Data it just replaces the OS' part.

If you changed some setting in the OS and installed Add-Ons you would have to do it again after the upgrade.

http://www.ditii.com/2008/02/06/windows-home-server-how-to-upgrade-from-trial-or-beta-version/

Otherwise, for safety purposes back up to another drive the files that you can not afford to lose and upgrade to the OEM version.

How to copy files?

When the dirve is in the second computer it would appear as two traditional drives.

Example like E: and F:, the second drive is the data drive. Enable sharing to the second drive and you should be able to coy files from it.
 

RebateMonger

Elite Member
Dec 24, 2005
11,586
0
0
You can also re-install the Trial (no Key required) and have another month's access. There are precautions to take when doing this. The original WHS System disk MUST be the first hard disk in the BIOS boot order. If it isn't, WHS will ask you for permission to format all the disks. Tell it "No". You don't want to do that.

If it's done correctly, WHS will offer to do a server re-installation as one of two choices.

There are several places to read up on how to do this properly.

Or, as JackMDS notes, WHS disks are standard Basic NTFS volumes and can be read by most any PC. If there are Permission issues, those are easily solveable. "Take Ownership" (a search of Microsoft.com will find this at the top of the search results) of the disks and then, set Security Permissions for your account to Full Control of the disk.

Finally, if the WHS is still running, my recollection is that you can still access the data shares remotely and copy them across the network, even if the WHS Trial license has expired. I know I've moved 1.2 TB of data from a WHS Trial version that was rebooting itself automatically every two hours due to license expiration. But it's best not to put yourself in that position.
 
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