Hi, I got this working up to a point. I have my Windows 10 laptop showing up in the WHS Console, but it's greyed out. But the connector on the toolbar shows red. Cannot connect to Windows Home Server. Please help.

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HP MediaSmart EX495 E8600 3.2Ghz CPU, 4GB ram, 8TB storage including 3TB drives in pool. WHS with Active Directory, WDS, Media Center Master, Logitech server. Office 2010 server with client add-ins.
Microsoft MVP - Windows Home Server.

@ZVincent

Just superb stuff. Thank you. After months of trying myself unsuccessfully and reading/trying every possible blog/suggestion, your instructions worked perfectly and allowed me to again use WHS v1 to backup my Windows 10 machine, which stopped working with WHS v1 after an OS reinstall. I fortunately had an old donor machine whose backup I didn't care about and was able to use this to complete the steps.

Thank you again.

Ian

Thanks for this terrific information. In case anyone is still playing with this, I have a couple of additional points:

1) I believe that a donor machine can be used multiple times. Once I updated the registry key on the WHS with the new Windows 10/11 Machine name and got the client working on the new machine I uninstalled the WHS client from the donor (I made sure that the original WHS registry key including the original client GUID and the client certificate were gone) and reinstalled it. WHS happily created a new certificate for the donor machine and that machine now appears in the WHS console along with the Windows 10/11 Machine that was connected using the previous certificate and GUID.

2) This also works if you export a donor certificate from the store on the server (the certificate ID is a leading “C” followed by the GUID for the donor machine with the hyphens removed (from HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows Home Server\Transport\Clients\). So you don't need a donor machine if you happen to have kept backups on your server from machines you no longer have. As long as you have one working client that can provide a template for the registry keys, you can export the related certificate from the server and update the related registry key templates with the GUID from the server.

I have a laptop running Win 10 which was happily backing up to the WHS V1 server until I had to re-install Win 10 last year. Needless to say re-installation of the WHS Connector failed. Luckily I had recently replaced the hard drive with an SSD so was able to re-install the original drive and extract registry entries from when it worked. Using these I was able to at least get backups operating, even though the WHSTray icon was red. When the information in this thread came along I knew I had to try it. Well I finally did and it worked like a charm. As I had all the information from the original working installation I only needed to carry out Step C in the document. That worked - proper connection to the server has been established - and all my previous backups still show on the server against the laptop. As a precaution I have extracted the registry and certificate information for the other computers connected to the server in case a similar situation should arise in the future with them.
Thanks to ZVincent for this.

While my Win 10 laptop continues to work fine, I have recently acquired some new Windows 11 computers. They are running Windows 11 23H2. I have tried @ZVincents procedure, which completes OK but the WHS Tray icon is greyed out as it has no connection. I can confirm that SMB 1 is activated, as is .NET 3.5 which includes 2.0. The two TLS cypher suites are also enabled. (The get command produces no output, just return to the command prompt, while the enable produces an error, identical to what I see on a Win 10 computer).
Exploring log end event files I found:
in the WHS Connector log:
[8/13/2024 5:12:29 PM 5568] Partner shut down the connection
[8/13/2024 5:12:29 PM 5568] Error performing handshake
In the Home Server event log:
An SSL connection request was received from a remote client application,
but none of the cipher suites supported by the client application are supported by the server.
The SSL connection request has failed.
To me it seems that Win 11 23H2 has made some change with respect to TLS and is not allowing use of the two cypher suites. Maybe its enforcing strong encryption?, which the two cypher are not seen as being.
This is now beyond my abilities to resolve. Is anyone able to shed light on this and what might have changed with 23H2?
Thanks,
Kevin

All:

The Windows 11 machine I had working with WHS V1 was running version V22H2. Today I manually upgraded it to V24H2 and after rebooting, the WHS Connector no longer worked. I determined that the Windows version update had disabled (but not removed) the required cipher suites listed in section C0. In order to not waste any further time on this, I simply followed the instructions in section C starting with enabling the cipher suites, and WHS V1 is again functioning.

-ZVincent

Thanks for this thread. I actually have 2 WHS units that have been gathering dust and wanted to utilize their space for a project. But completely forgot my password so attempted a recovery... and can't get in. I'll try on one of my old laptops which still has windows XP on it but I was excited to find this thread and that people still use these boxes