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PostPosted: Sat Dec 19, 2009 3:32 pm 
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The machine is a home-built WHS box, PP3, backup drive is a USB 2.0 connected WD external drive. Up until recently I had no problem doing backups to the WD drive. Now all of the sudden they fail, consistently, at 38%. I've also tried to change the backup target to a network location on another machine and that fails at the same 38% as well. I've pruned out some older machine backups thinking that might help, it has not. The error shows in the event log as this:

System.IO.IOException: The semaphore timeout period has expired.

at System.IO.__Error.WinIOError(Int32 errorCode, String maybeFullPath)
at System.IO.File.InternalCopy(String sourceFileName, String destFileName, Boolean overwrite)
at Microsoft.HomeServer.HomeServerConsoleTab.WHSBDBB.HomeServerSettingsExtender.DoBackup()

The very next entry is an event saying the backup completed successfully, though it did not. I've run a check on the drive, it's showing as fine. There is nothing else on the drive, I use it exclusively for backups so it's not an issue of being out of free space. I'm not understanding why this has just stopped working all of the sudden. Anyone have any idea what's going on? Thanks.


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PostPosted: Sat Dec 19, 2009 5:19 pm 
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First, welcome to the world of MSS/WHS! Good to have you aboard! (And we will certainly try to help!)

What did you do to "check the drive"? Anything less than CHKDSK /R (a full scan and repair) if not sufficient.

And what disk did you check? Only the target? If that passes the CHKDSK /R it is time to test each drive in the server.

It is highly likely you have a disk problem. We need to determine if it is source or target -- and WHICH disk.

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PostPosted: Sat Dec 19, 2009 6:38 pm 
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Mr. Bick,
Thank you for the warm welcome, I appreciate it. I did run a full check on the target drive (it passed) but have not done so on the storage drives in the array since nothing was happening that would indicate there was a problem on any of them. Is there a preferred method to doing a check on the source drives? The only way I can see to run a checkdisk on any of the storage drives is to do a checkdisk on D:, will this cause all the drives in the array to have a check run on them? Thanks for the help.

Seth

[EDIT: Nevermind, I just ran across the instructions for running chkdsk in the cmd window on the mount points for the individual drives, i.e. C:\FS\DRIVELETTER, I'm giving that whirl to see what happens]


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PostPosted: Sat Dec 19, 2009 11:48 pm 
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Hi Seth, that stack trace shows that the file.copy is blowing up way down in the OS, and a quick search didn't turn up any obvious reports on the internet. I'd suspect a hardware issue... I will look at the code and see why BDBB thinks the backup was successful in this case, though.

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PostPosted: Sun Dec 20, 2009 8:20 am 
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But does that "hardware issue" eliminate the disk drives in the storage pool as a potential source of the problem?

Unless Alex suggests otherwise I would still test those pool drives. Thast it repeatedly stops at the same point is typically an indication of aa disk problem.

While CHKDSK is run nightly I don't believe it is done as thoroughly as you would get with testing them manually. Easiest way is to shut down the MSS, pull out the drives one at a time, and place them in another computer (or in one of those eSATA external test holders that are USB-connected). Then either run CHKDSK x: /R from a command prompt *OR* navigate to the disk properties and on the tools tab select the error checking. Within that check BOTH boxes and run it. On large disks this will take considerable time as every disk sector will be tested. (And remember to do this to BOTH partitions on the System Drive.)

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PostPosted: Sun Dec 20, 2009 9:19 am 
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I started running chkdsk with the /R flag last night on the drives using the FS mount points and it's working fine, it's just REALLY slow (1.5TB Green Power drives). So far one of the drives actually reported 4 bad clusters and claims to have repaired them so I'm going to finish doing the chkdsk runs and then see what happens.


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PostPosted: Sun Dec 20, 2009 11:57 am 
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JohnBick wrote:
But does that "hardware issue" eliminate the disk drives in the storage pool as a potential source of the problem?



I meant a hardware issue on the server, most likely a drive inconsistency on a drive in the storage pool. It sounds like chkdsk found some bad clusters so this could indeed have been the issue. It will be interesting to see if the process is successful after the chkdsk completes.

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PostPosted: Sun Dec 20, 2009 10:45 pm 
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Ok, it took what felt like a lifetime (almost a full day) but I completed the chkdsk runs with the /R flag on all 6 pool drives plus the external drive which is the target for the backups. After that I ran a backup database repair just for that extra bit of safety. I've got a BDBB backup of the backups going and it's already made it past the point where previous backups were failing so it would appear the process I went through corrected the previous problem.

Thanks to everyone for the help. I've had an unrelated issue before that required me to do a recovery install of the OS. Having a backup of the backups turned out to be a pretty valuable thing in that situation so I really appreciate the existence of your add-in, Alex.

I was, am and will likely continue to be a huge fan of Windows Home Server. Not only is the product a really excellent addition to any home network but the support I've gotten from the WHS user community has been really great.

[EDIT: The backup finished successfully, hooray.]


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PostPosted: Mon Dec 21, 2009 9:27 am 
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GREAT news... Thanks for the update!

Happy holidays and have a safe and joyous New Year!

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EX475, 2 GB, LE-1640
PC1: Vista-->W7 Ultimate/32, (D-Drive RAID-5 Array)
PC2: Lenovo Laptop, Win XP Home SP3
2xLinksys WRT54G v1.1 and 2xNetGear GS105 Gbit switch


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PostPosted: Mon Dec 21, 2009 11:33 am 
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Good to hear that resolved the problem, thanks for following up!

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