Windows 2008 R2

Having seen Missing Remote’s reviews of the Intel Media Series motherboards it should be clear that they provide a solid foundation for a home theater PC (HTPC) build, but because they also include Intel NICs (network interface controller) there is a strong case to use one for your next server build as well.  Unfortunately, Intel does not support server operating systems (OS) like Windows 2008 R2 (W2K8R2), which provides the foundation for Windows Home Server 2011 (WHS), so the installation process is more involved than it should be.  I didn’t have a USB key install of WHS handy so for this walk through I used W2K8R2; everything should be the same except that for WHS you can skip a step.  Let’s get started.

Getting the server OS actually installed was no different than Windows 7 (i.e. simple and uneventful) so we’ll assume everyone has that step covered.  After logging in I took a screen shot of Device Manager to show the devices that were undetected.  Not all of the drivers listed below are required to make it work, but we will install them anyway for completeness.