The Windows Home Server 2011 Connector Has Encountered An Unexpected Error On Windows 7 Ultimate X86

Is it possible you need to uninstall the old WHS connector before installing WHS 2011 version? Or is it not installed/uninstalled already?

It may be different for WHS 2011, but this may give you a direction to start looking for more info.

I don’t think the error has anything to do with WHS. Most likely the installer. I’d focus my search on that. I’ve seen this happen a dozen times with all sorts of installations. 

It could be the installer doesn’t have rights to the folder because of some registry error, something marked a folder read only, a service not running, service won’t start… 

You might check the event viewer also to see if it gave a more detailed error.

Did you look everywhere in the event viewer? Sometimes messages are scattered around. I think there’s a spot for setup logs IIRC.

Not sure if this is relative but I always had issues with V1 reinstalling the connector unless I wiped out the whs entries from the registry. Quite often removing whs connector from programs and features took two attemps as well.

Ok, had this exact same error connecting a new Windows 8 machine to a WHS 2011 with update rollup 4. All normal stuff tried, download connector via IPv4 address e.g. http://192.168.1.10/connector so that it tries to connect via IP rather than name to eliminate name resolution faking (DNS errrors) on the router. Everything tried simply barfs immediately after entering home server password with ‘unspecified error’.

So, looked closely at the server to see if I could figure out why. Turns out that I also was unable to remove an old machine from the server too using remote desktop onto server and firing up the dashboard, clicking computers and backups, picking an old defunct PC and trying to remove it. Got exactly the same useless ‘unspecified error’. Much digging, registry monitoring googling, scouring the near useless WHS logs, found out the the Active Directory Certificate Service was err’ing at startup. Now this service is especially important during connection or removal because it supplies the unique ID for a new PC which also must be revoked for removal – same system, same problem. So looking at why the service fails showed me that the certificate services database was corrupt. This is a file that resides by default in c:windowssystem32CertLog folder. The file called <servername>-CA.edb is a database that stores the certificate data for each machine and when corrupted due to e.g. unscheduled server shutdown (power cut, forced switch off or whatever) causes the certifcate service to fail. To see if you have this same problem, fire up a remote desktop session to your server and logon. Open the services snap-in (start, run, services.msc), and look at the first services ‘active directory certificate services’ then attempt to start it. It might start but then stop within a few seconds. If it’s stopped, you won’t be able to join new machines to the WHS and you’ll get the unspecified error message.

How do we fix this? Well, it’s not that difficult, MS provides the tools to fix it pre-installed on your WHS. All you need is the command prompt (right-click command prompt and ‘run as administrator’) and a database repair tool, esentutl. Fire up your command prompt, navigate to the CertLog folder (default is c:windowssystem32certlog) and first check the database using ‘esentutl /g <servername>-CA.edb’ (replace <server name> with the name of your server – check the file using ‘dir’ to see it first). You might get a warning here along the lines of ‘log files exist, you should apply these before repairing’. If you get that mesage, simply run ‘esentutl /r edb’. Hopefully this will succeed and if it does, you can the delete the ‘.log’ files. Once you have removed the log files, run ‘esentutl /p <servername>-CA.edb’ to defrag the database. All being well, you should now be able to start the certificate services. Now run the connector installer again and hopefully, no more error.

Enjoy!

Matt