I initially though that the default driver installed with Server 2012 for the nVidia ForceWare network adapters of my motherboard did not support Wake-On-Lan (as reported sometimes for other brand). But after installing the latest drivers from Asus website, WOL was not yet effective… All the settings of the machine were the default ones (issued from the installation) as I didn’t touch any of them yet… So I started to enable/disable/reenable plenty of various settings before being finally able to remotely wake up my PC with a Magic Packet (I am using the “WOL” page of my Buffalo router for sending those messages).

First, notice that depending on the Motherboard, Wake-On-Lan could work for you only if your PC is in a Sleep mode or in an Hibernate mode. Mine can be waked-up from a full shutdown (as most recent/decent motherboards 🙂 ).

• In the Computer Management > Device Manager > Network adapter > right click Properties on “your adapter“
• In the tab “Power Management”, check all the options:
  • Allow this computer to turn off this device to save power
  • Allow this device to wake up the computer
  • Only allow a magic packet  to wake up the computer
• In the tab “Advanced”
  • Enable the adequate WOL features, whose names depend on your adapter:
    • “Wake up capabilities” must be “Magic Packet” or “Both”
    • “Wake On Magic Packets”            < I have this one
    • “Wake Up From Shutdown”
    • “Wake On Lan After Shutdown”
    • “Wake On Lan From PowerOff”     < I have this one
    • “Shutdown Wake-On-Lan”
    • “Wake On Lan”
    • “Wake On Pattern Match”             < I have this one
    • …
  • WOL however only started to work for me when I did disable “Device Sleep on Disconnect” in this advanced tab.
  • Microsoft White paper on this topic here.
• In the Bios, you need to enable features like:
  • Remote Wakeup
  • Power On By PCI/PCIE Devices  < I have this one. It includes “Onboard Lan”. Nothing else requires to be enabled in the Bios.

Et voilà.