I had setup the new Home Server 2011 on one of my servers and have been transitioning stuff off my Home Server v1.
So after all of the data has been transferred and I had setup the server in a way that makes sense to me (given that Drive Extender, DE, is not there anymore and how much I miss that… That is a completely separate post by itself)
Then I started moving my client machines over. I left my main desktop off till the last and I came to it yesterday.
The Connect installation is quite simple and it just asks around 2-3 simple questions and that’s it. The problem is that they have made it so simple that it becomes very difficult when there is a problem. So the only error the setup reports is a wonderfully descriptive – “The Windows Home Server 2011 Connector has encountered an unexpected error” or something like that (Well everyone knows what an unexpected error is and can easily fix that. Right )..
After some searching, I found an KB article saying that a few services need to be running and I was still getting this error after I confirmed those services were good.
Then I came upon this post on the forum that talks about this problem occurring if a beta .NET 4.0 was installed..
Then it stuck me.. I had installed the VS 2010 Beta on this machine a long time back and then after playing around for a few days, forgotten about that (as I rarely use that machine for any development). So I uninstalled all the pieces that was installed with VS 2010 Beta and then also uninstalled .NET 4.0 Beta.
Only problem was, half way thru the uninstall something happened and my machine blue
screened. The Beta disappeared from the Program and Features screen. So I went ahead and installed the full .NET 4.0 RTM. But still Connector will not install. Same Problem as before.
So I tried to uninstall .NET 4.0 RTM thinking I will clean everything and try again. Now it wouldn’t uninstall cleanly. It would go half way and crash. So basically I got stuck with a half installed .NET 4.0.
Then I came upon the .NET cleanup utility. Downloaded the latest version and set it up to clean up .NET 4.0. It actually went half way and then the system re-booted. Not sure if this was the planned way, but when I checked the log, it seemed as if there was an error. So I just ran the utility again and it went through fine.
Then I went and installed the full .NET 4.0 RTM and then the Connector install went thru fine with no problems.
It would have been a lot easier and saved me around 5+ hours if the setup had just said, there was a wrong version of the .NET Framework, instead of the great “unexpected error”…
