Recommendations for an WHS 2011 Build
 

Been venturing into the home server side of PCs, and just recently purchased the Asus P8H77-I for a WHS 2011 build. Unfortunately, the drivers cannot install on the WHS 2011 OS. I've tried using the Windows XP/Vista/7 64bit drivers but they still don't work.

Asus tech support has stated that the P8H77-I cannot support WHS 2011.

So basically I'm **** out of luck. Can anyone recommend an alternative LGA 1155 ITX board that will work with WHS 2011?

Thanks

Which drivers? Before spending money on a new board is it something you can live without? I couldnt get USB 3 running and took a while to get sound installed on my build. Driver support for whs 2011 is poor but it turned out in my case USB 3 doesnt matter, and really sound mattered even less.

Sound is disabled on my WHS2011 install by default.

You do not want to install XP drivers on your WHS2011 install. Either use Windows7 or Server2008 for drivers. In time the drivers will be made available.

Oh, and get a 60gb SSD for your WHS, it really livens it up. Take the "server folder" drawers off the SSD of course.

Although I have no personal recommendations, may I suggest checking out the website: wegotserved.com We Got Served

They have some excellent how-to guides for various projects such as WHS 2011 builds, add-ins, and much more. Good luck.

Hey le2key, I just did a WHS2011 build on an ASUS P8Z77-I Deluxe (specs in sig). Most of the win7 driver install packages from Asus wouldn't work for me on this board either.

I downloaded some of the chipset drivers etc. directly from Intel and was able to install them. I was also able to install some of the Asus drivers by going into device manager, update driver and then manually selecting the drivers rather than running the install packages. Between those two methods i was able to install all of the drivers I needed. Also, like Perineum says, an SSD is great for a WHS boot drive. WHS "requires"a 160GB+ boot drive, but you can find tutorials on how to bypass this.

I let it install to a large HD first, deleted the second partition, shrunk the c: partition, then cloned it "as is" with Acronis 2013 to the SSD. Acronis 2013 made the adjustments for the proper 4k alignment for the SSD in the clone.

Hey guys, apparently I did have the correct drivers; the problem was running the asussetup.exe. I had to run the "setup.exe" instead, everything is working just dandy now. Man I knew there was something stupid I was overlooking.

As for the SSD, I did purchase an Intel 330 180gb from newegg during their shell shocker deals. Following the online tutorials, I noticed that average HD usage would border around the 175gb, sometimes over the 180gb mark. I didn't want to be in that situation since I was weary as it is, so I just installed WHS on a regular HD and used intel's SRT SSD caching with one of my older Adata SSD instead. The boot up is very fast, and the dashboard initializes especially quickly now.

I put the Intel SSD into my parents' computer since they were sort of complaining about the boot-time. Lol, they were expecting computers to turn on as fast as a modern TV before this; the SSD was able to help realize that expectation.

My SSD is only 60GB, it has 22GB free still from full install plus a few extras