I have a Lenovo G580 lappy with Windows 8 64 bit installed. I have WHS 2011 with Update Rollup 4 & the recent UEFI Hotfix installed. The Lenovo has a Qualcom Atheros AR8162 PCI-E NIC.
I have successfully backed up the client PC to WHS 2011 & I am testing the bare metal restore process. The G580 won't boot from the internal DVD ROM so I have created a USB restore key via the Dashboard. This all worked fine & I can boot from the USB by changing from UEFI to legacy is the BIOS. The problem I now have in the perennial issue of not being able to find the server after having been through the driver installation process.
Microsoft says that the restoration environment is Win7 PE 32 bit, whilst the target OS is Win 8 64bit. I have a separate USB stick with both Win7 32bit & Vista 32 bit drivers as well as the Chipset & AHCI drivers.
When I run the restore wizard, no NIC is reported. In the panel below it lists the SATA & AHCI devices. When I insert the drivers USB stick it scans & reports drivers found, but nothing is shown for the NIC.
If I use the drivers in the "Drivers for full system restore" folder, these load a driver for the NIC & show it correctly named in the top panel but when I try to connect to the server either automatically or manually using both the server name or its IP address I see activity on the NIC LEDs but no connectivity. The wizard reports "Unknown Network Problem". REALLY informative!
I believe the drivers in the "Drivers for full system restore" folder are 64 bit & this is causing the NIC to fail. According to M$ the Win7 32 bit drivers should be the ones to use but I can't make the restore wizard recognise them. As the NIC is PCI-E I'm wondering if the chipset driver is not being loaded before The NIC driver attempts to load.
I see from a trawl of the web that this is an ongoing issue that has no unique solution.
Having waited patiently for the UEFI hotfix, I thought I was now OK for Win8/UEFI backup/restore. Silly me! BTW, the server is fully patched with all the critical Windows Updates.
Any suggestions to fix this issue would be much appreciated.
Apologies for the long post, but I wanted to make sure I'd detailed the problem as fully as possible.