Here's the problem I just ran into with the WHS 2011 client restore where I needed to restore to a new hard drive in a machine - the restore process does't automatically create the partitions on disk for you!
I spent the better part of a day trying various partition schemes, restoring, ending up with a computer that wouldn't boot, then googling over the Internet for alternative partitioning, restoring ending up again with a computer that wouldn't boot over and over; generally getting frustrated.
Then I had a brilliant idea - I simply dug out my Windows media and started an install. After the first reboot when the install resumes off of the hard drive I stopped the install process. At that point I knew the proper recovery partition and main partition had been made (and obviously were working since setup booted successfully) so I powered down the machine, plugged in the WHS USB boot key and when it got to the screen where you map backed up drives to drives on the computer the needed partitions were there and the WHS restore even mapped to them automatically! The restore completed and the machine booted the first time.
Success!
Don't ask me why MS couldn't save the partition configuration as part of the WHS client backup, and when a completely empty hard drive is detected automatically create them. It's the lack of attention to details like that that separates companies like Microsoft from companies like Apple... I don't know how long I would have been screwing around with the restore if I hadn't had the inspiration to let the Windows setup program create the partitions for me....
Oh yeah, this was with the Windows 8 consumer preview - which apparently does some new, screwy stuff with boot hard drive partitioning. I've restored XP and Windows 7 with no problem, manually creating partitions - but the same techniques didn't work with Windows 8. The good news is, once I let the Windows 8 installer create the partitions on the hard drive the restore process worked flawlessly so WHS 2011 and Windows 8 work perfectly well together - beta or not!
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