I thought i write a brief overview of my experience and couple of troubleshooting that i did (which may help others). Followed most of the instructions from the great article here: http://www.mediasmartserver.net/2010/04 ... art-server

My WHS: Ex470, upgraded 4 GB ram and upgraded CPU ADD4200 Dual core.

1. I bought the retail copy of WHS 2011 and created a boot USB (used steps in http://www.intowindows.com/bootable-usb)
2. I moved all my data to external drives and my home pc before i nuke the existing harddrives.
3. Connected the 4 internal hard drives of WHS to my home PC and deleted all partitions.
4. then i connected my orginal 500GB hard drive to bottom bay, plugged the bootable USB at bottom USB slot and keyboard at front and booted.
-- it is better to put your smallest size hard drive for OS as you will need larger drives to hold data
5. Now i tried the steps for first time given on the "how to install whs 2011 on media server" and my server did come up was installing WHS 2011, i was able to connect to the server to see progress via http://myserverip/connect (my server ip remained the same as on my router i have reserved the ip for the same mac address) -- also i kept my home server name the same in cfg.ini
--- then i came back after 5 mins and my server was off i realized that the cpu got heated up while install was happening, so i tried restarting everything from scratch
a. deleted partitions again from the 500GB drive and plugged in and restarted with a fan infront of my open EX470 front door.
b. but i was getting no where.. blue light blinked and blinked and blinked..
c. then thanks to Claude, i realized that the first setup wrote the like "Processed=true" in my cfg.ini file on the USB and that caused the setup to never start
d. I tried to delete it and restart the process but could get anywhere. it was frustrating because i didnt had any VGA cable
e. then saw a post and powered down my PC and plugged the USB there and the harddrive (disconnected the home pc hd)
f. i saw the setup starting and then it pausing at a screen asking if this is new setup, which drive to use and it started installing.
g. as soon as install finshed and it rebooted. i shut off the home pc
h. plugged the usb and hard drive back to my ex470 and started it
i. behold, all started fine and i was able to connect to ex470 via http://homeserverip/connect
6. Now i was able to follow all the steps and got my home server up and running.
7. Next hurdle i faces was recovering my .homeserver.com domain via my live ID. Now when ever i tried to login and try to associate my old .homeserver.com domain, the wizard throws an error that operation cannot be completed
8. after researching around i got a common tip where client pc was having trouble join the server or live domain linking issue. I found that the time needed to be in sync between the server and client machines and that live domain retrival also needed this sync.
a. followed the recommendation and manually set the server and client machine times to sync with: time.nist.gov instead of time.windows.com... now this has almost 4 mins difference for me. (To change this click on time in notification area -> click 'change date and time settings -> last tab allows you to specify which server to use for syncing time)
b. after this, retried my .homeserver.com linking and logged into my live id. and vola.. everything worked fine.
9. then i added all my other hard drives and added them to the storage pool
10. added my home pc and home theater pc and they both installed the connector and joined the server without any issue (via http://<home server ip>/connect
11. Next hurdle i faced was that my laptop (that is on my worked joined domain) was not getting joined on home server and the wizard via http://<home server ip>/connect was just throwing "unexpected error") again and again.

a. after some research found that the issue was with NetTcpPortSharing service as it was not getting started on my machine due to bad registry settings. http://social.msdn.microsoft.com/Forums ... 5a4344006d
b. now i went to registry and changed the valus of the entries with paths like: \Microsoft.NET\Framework64\v4.0.20506 to \Microsoft.NET\Framework64\v4.0.30319 (which is the latest folder there)
c. after this i started the NetTcpPortSharing service and it sarted fine
d. then started the connector software and all worked perfectly and my laptop is joined to the server
e. the way i found that NetTcpPortSharing was the issue, is by looking at the ClientDeploy.log file: http://social.microsoft.com/Forums/en/w ... 5c80e761f1
12. So all my client machines are connected and i manually created similar users for them on my home server
13. Now before you copy back your data. check which data can fit easily on which drive. and from the dashboard move the exisiting empty category to that drive. Example, i moved videos to my 2TB drive, my pictures to 1TB and my music and documents to another 1 TB drive
14. after this move i copied back all the data to respective drives and folders
15. conncted my 2TB external drive to the home server and setup my server backup on that

and thats it.. face 3 hurdles and my whs 2011 on ex470 was up and running.

Since then the performance of the server is much better and i didnt need to increase my server fans in any way and they are not heating up as it used to on whs v1.

hope this article help some ppl facing similar issues.

Thanks for sharing your experience.

I also have HP EX470, I would like to install WHS 2011. I have 3 data drives each is 2 TB and the stock HD (500GB). They're 50% full. I was wondering if I could first physically and safely remove the 3 data drives, then remove the original 500 GB from slot 1, take that drive to the desktop and wipeout any of the partitions, and then follow you method of the installation.

My question is: Once the WHS 2011 is successfully installed and running, can I then insert the 3 data drives back in the server and still be able to retrieve all of my original data which was on already theme, or will I lose the whole data because is no longer accessible due the changing the OS?

the new 2011 does not have drive extender, so if the old server stored and maintain data usng drive extender then you cannot just plug the drive s and get your data.

the best way is to.. copy the data to external storage or your desktop ..basically copy all your data out of WHS v1
then you can just turn off v1. attache drives to your desktop and format them there.

once you have installed WHS2011 on the 500GB one, plug in the blank drives in
and then copy the data back into the server

Thanks for your insight.

I've been experimenting with my Acer easyStore H340 and have noticed that waking up the WHS from the client PC (like in V.1) is no longer available after 2011 installation, is that feature removed as well?