Restoring from Windows Home Server 2011?

Last night before bed I had an Adobe update that required a reboot. So set my machine to reboot while I went to bed. I woke up this morning to a machine that couldn’t boot up. A few quick trials before I left for the office turned out to be unproductive. Then at home this evening I spent an hour, swapping cables, trying to boot, trying different SATA ports, trying to boot to a Windows 7 CD to try and do a repair.

No dice. So then I set out to investigate how I could do a restore from my Windows Home Server 2011 (RC) backups. I figured out that I could create a bootable USB drive, so I had to find a stick (I never have them around cause I never use them). I finally found one, created the bootable restore stick and nothing, I couldn’t get booted to it. After trying a number of CMOS settings I was unsuccessful, so I figured I would try to create the restore key again.

Now I am in the process of restoring, or at least trying to boot up into the restore mode.

I’m really not sure what the issue is, I hope my Western Digital Raptor 300 isn’t dead, though I guess that would be fitting, it could join the Raptor 150 that I have sitting here waiting to get an RMA for.