I ended up buying a N40L for 179. Now I have to figure out what to do with my Ex485...

I started getting this issue since past 2 days and I am thinking what to do now. Its a 2 year old server Its been rebooting every 5 minutes for past 72 hours..

ex487 here. Same problem. Rebooting with good system drive or when booting to recovery program. The more drives I add, the sooner the server reboots. Maybe a faulty power supply. Any ideas are welcome.

Hi- I've had the constant power-cycling problem and the boot order issue so I thought I'd chime in here.

I figured out what the problem was with the power cycling. It turned out to be a bad power supply. Yeah, it was good enough to start the computer, but I assume at some certain load, it gasped and restarted. The funny thing is that it had enough power to allow me to completely check the BIOS settings, but booting anything caused it to stall out in less than a minute.

Think for a minute- if the boot order was wrong, then it shouldn't keep rebooting that quickly. Not even the five minutes someone else has observed. If it was booting from the internal flash drive, the bootstrap program would boot once and wait indefinitely listening to the ethernet for the recovery program. Trying to boot from a flash drive (Ubuntu and even DOS) still had the same problem. I thought I might have had bad RAM, but I also replaced that (using lower rated RAM, but it passed up the POST- Power-On Self Test).

But yeah, I also have the boot order problem even after replacing my power supply using an old ATX supply and following the instructions for changing the connector pinout posted elsewhere on this site.

I've only just fixed my power supply and started the recovery last night, so I haven't had time to fix the problem- I've just had it crop up a couple of times. Sometimes WHS reboots (as it often does after reinstalling the software) and it ends up running the recovery client. Going into the BIOS shows that the boot order is swapped so I switch it back. We'll see how it is when I get back from work today. It's quite possible I didn't even need to run the recovery- possibly the boot order was already screwed up and had I fixed it at the beginning, it would have booted from the hard drive and happily run.

But I assume there are a couple of things I can still try:

• Take the flash drive out of the boot order- I'm wondering if pressing the front panel button would force it to boot from the flash drive even if it's not in the usual boot order.
• Completely disable or delete the flash drive. I've already copied it and have been able to get another computer to boot from that copy, so I wouldn't be completely hosed if I needed to perform a recovery again.
  
  I'm also wondering if connecting the debug cable is partly causing the problem- we've installed a jumper and shorted pins 3 & 4 on CN2 in order to be able to have the keyboard work. Might one of those jumpers be allowing the BIOS to modify itself? So maybe
• I'll try removing the debug cable and jumper and see if the problem continues.
• Edit: I see that someone has mentioned changing the BIOS option for the flash drive from "Auto" to "Disabled" but there has been no followup in over a year. Maybe I'll see what that does.

Yeah, I missed out on the Proliant deals over the past few months, so that's why I'm trying to get my MSS working. I figure if there's another deal on just the Proliant, I'll see how it works with the MSS's WHS (now that I have the flash drive copied) but I don't mind going to WHS 2011 either. I'm just tired of having to troubleshoot and fix my WHS system every 1-1/2 years.

Hi,

I took apart the little one and checked the power supply. As suspected, a high 30Khz ripple under load in the +3.3 VDC line was the problem. The pics show a level close to 900mv Pk to Pk while booting with no drives. With the system drive this reading would go as high as 1.4 V Pk-Pk.

Since the server is running WD Caviar Black Drives I went ahead and got the 300W Athena Power supply from Newegg and modified the wiring for the ex487 power connector.

No more constant rebooting. Everything is running fine now. See pics.

Thanks for the support!

I have the same problem, my server keeps rebooting, so I thought i would add to the thread with what I have found/tested so far..
First I thought it was a failing HD so i tested all my drives separately using a different machine and an exteransl sata/usb adapter. All of the drives were fine... But doing so, I noticed that if I removed one of of the drives, the server wouldn't reboot repeatedly, which led me to believe this is either a SATA adapter failure (doubt it), or more likely a power supply failure..
I dont think I want to replace the power supply, but instead get a new system entirely, the problem now which is why I am adding to the thread is how to save as much of the data as possible. My latest backup was not that recent and I have tons of videos and photos of my newborn in there which is going to get me exciled by wife
So that said, I am trying a few things to try to back up the data before I retire the server... do you guys have any pointers here? I am basically working every time with a "Missing" drive.. which is causing health issues for some of the duplicated folders and obviously missing data for the non duplicated ones (which luckily was only my movies folder).

You need to "Remove" the missing drive via the Console so WHS can rebalance your data. Then you can pull your data off via the shares, or recover it manually. http://social.microsoft.com/Forums/en-U ... 573697777f

_________________
Alex Kuretz
Remote Notification: Monitoring and alerting for your Home Server via email, Twitter, text message, RSS, push notifications, and on your Mac desktop
Have you tried our Add-Ins?

ok its definitely a power supply issue... not sure whats going on with it yet though. The problem is that i cannot reliably back up the files because it can shutdown at any time... does any one know a solution to getting the files out of the drives (backing them up) without the actual server? I have the external sata adapter to connect trough usb (one at a time though)...

Did you read my link above? I posted the instructions on how to recover your data with or without your server.

_________________
Alex Kuretz
Remote Notification: Monitoring and alerting for your Home Server via email, Twitter, text message, RSS, push notifications, and on your Mac desktop
Have you tried our Add-Ins?

I think I encountered the same thing recently.

My server keeps rebooting in a sort of 2 quick reboots 1-2 seconds before powering down, waiting 5 seconds and starting over, 1 longer reboot sort of fashion. Never becomes online/visible to connector or brings up the OS.

I bought the debug cable which shows what's going on, can get into setup and adjust drive order, etc. Nothing seems to help, I've had no drives, one drive, clean drive, no network, on network but not connected to internet, and on network connected to internet. Used the pin to try to get it to go to discovery modes and no dice. In the booting sequence above, the short boots never show anything on the screen, the long boot shows standard boot info DEL to enter setup, etc. and will succeed with entering setup and after setup shows a screen with BIOS, memory, HD info for a few seconds prior to it shutting down and starting again.

If I hold pin in during boot I can get it to stay running, but it won't show the bios posts, just goes to a blank screen mode on the monitor and fans/drives continue to run.

All the tips I've learned from HP customer support have failed me.

This seems to be different from previous issues which never forced reboots they simple just hung somewhere in the process and stayed powered on.

I've made no mods other than beefing up the harddrives about 2-3 years back.

It shows:

AMI version 08.00.15
ID HPMSS017

I'm not sure how much debug to put into getting this up and running, I have a carcass of a desktop around, with a much bigger power supply, i could try that if that seems like a reasonable chance of success.

Willing to hear any further suggestions for debug next steps, or suggestions to end the frustration and give up. I hope to follow the instructions on getting my data off the drives. I know where the files are and I've moved stuff around before, but I have some files which when I try to open them in a player with a USB sata dock connector are saying I/O -36 error. Many files work, but some say this. Not sure if that is because the file is split across multiple disks, or whether something else is going on there.

I'm thinking of a Proliant N40L. Wondering how folks have found those? Also which setups SW wise they recommend? WHS2011, FreeNAS seem to be 2 options. Any pointers to setup links on how to get a Proliant up and running with either/both of those OSes would be welcome.

Thanks,

Marc