Yes, I have bought WHS and installed it myself on a PC I have used during the beta testing period. And finally, WHS did what is supposed to do. Helped me to recover the broken computer.
The story short:
- One day WHS icon popped up with yellow message like “your wife’s computer wasn’t backed up for couple of days”.
- Single click deeper revealed message like “unable to read disk C”.
- chkdsk /r /f (check disk command line option, by the way, suggested by the WHS) reveals quite a bunch of bad blocks
- Tried to backup once more, no luck … some more bad blocks come in :(
- Next day I bought in the local shop new disk for her laptop (a bit bigger of course), replaced and booted from WHS computer recovery CD
- Few answers to questions: the language settings, WHS password, the computer to restore
- Selected last successful backup to restore
- Waited for ~40minutes (could be a bit faster, but the another computer started backup in the evening or … night … well, you know)
- Restart and …
- Like it hasn’t been broken
Hopefully, I will not need to repeat the procedure with any of the home computers soon, but … IT WORKED, when the things went wrong :D
And of course, there is always a little downside to the story: I had to reactivate Windows - you know, the hard disk has been changed. I had to use the phone version, because online activation didn’t worked. And funny thing, the automated IVR system said that it’s the key for Windows XP, while actually it was Windows Vista Home Premium :)