Hello All,

So I had a power outage the other night. I unplugged the EX470 after the power outage and now I tried to restart my server today. The server starts up and goes through its boot sequence and all the drives light up blue and then all of a suddent the lights go out except the power light. After s hort amount of time the lights will come back on and then go out again. HELP PLEASE!!!!

Hi coachpete0405 welcome to the forums,

This issue is common not just with your EX470 but can actually happen to any computer when there is a power failure. The primary issue has to do with drive corruption on drives being written to when a power failure occurs. All is not lost but when you will need to do is to run a CHKDSK /r on all your servers drives which can be done by connecting them to another computer internally or externally in an enclosure, docking station or USB-SATA Cable.

There is no fun or quick way around this. In the past I have instructed people to backout their storage pool drives leaving only the system drive in and then to boot the server. If the server boots and stays running then you will know the system drive is not the issue. Shut down the server and insert one storage pool drive and turn the server on. If the server boots and stays running then the drives in the server should be fine. Keep doing this until the problem you see reappears and then shut the server down and that will be the drive you need to run a CHKDSK /r on. Repeat this process until you have ruled out all your drives.

Hopefully the drive(s) you ran a CHKDSK on will get repaired and things will return to normal for you. One important thing I need to tell you is that with only 1 missing storage pool drive your server will pinch a fit and complain about the missing drives calling them missing or failed. The server will complain about file corruption and inform you that the client backup database is corrupt. These Alerts and Warnings are typical and until all your drives are back in the server and running simply ignore them and if all goes well the Alerts and Warnings will go away and you will be back to normal.

Now this is going to take you quite sometime as you will soon discover and its actually preventable. To prevent this in the future you should purchase and install a UPS or Battery Backup. APC has software that you can install on your server thats compatable with WHS. Basically the power comes from the UPS and the sever communicates with the UPS via a USB Cable. When power surges or sags the UPS takes over to keep the power within a certain range. In the event of a power failure the UPS will instruct the server to shut down thus preventing the potential for hard drive corruption. I recommend you set the UPS Software to shut the server down when the battery capacity reaches 80%. Also keep in mind that Batteries do not last forever and should be changed out every 3 yrs but sometimes the replacement batteries cost as much as the unit itself.

I am currently working on a Troubleshooting Guide which will cover a wide range of topics such as this. I have also worked extensively with EX470's and have written extensively in the forums helping others with various issues they have encountered with them. I am not the only one either so just about anything you can imagine having to do with the EX470 has probably already been written out here in the forums and so your best friend here is the Site Search.

Let me know how you make out and if there is anything else I can do to help you out feel free to ask.

_________________
Exploring the possibilities!

Migrated from WHS2011 to WS2012E: HIGHLANDER

~ Norco 4220 Enclosure
~ Gigabyte GA-990FXA-UD5
~ AMD Phenom II X4 995 3.2 GHz
~ 8 GB Corsair Vengeance DDR3 1600 (PC3 12800)
~ 3 Supermicro AOC-SASLP-MV8

Hi

My EX470 just died. No power at all and I am not interested to buy a power supply also I have a lot of stuff on the 4 drives. My question, is it possible to buy a box with no disk and put my EX470 drives in the right sequence in that new box without having any problem.

Thanks

Hi voukisy welcome to the forums!

If the box your refering to is another working EX470 or EX475 then yes you can install the drives and the server will work fine. The only important drive location wise is the bottom drive which must be installed in the bottom bay and WHS will not care which bays the other drives are in or if they are in an external enclosure so long as it can see the drives.

If your refering to installing the drives in anything else you will run into issues with the HP Software which you will need to work around and also you would need to install drivers and will need the COA Key on the bottom of the server. But the biggest problem you will encounter is the day you need to perform a server recovery because the supplied HP Recovery Disks only work for the server they came with. Best work around would be to obtain a copy of WHS v1, gather the drivers for the computer or BOX as you put it. Install the drives and perform a server recovery which is quite different then the HP Method so you have to excersise caution or you could format all your drives but once done everything will work just fine but you will not have the HP Software.

_________________
Exploring the possibilities!

Migrated from WHS2011 to WS2012E: HIGHLANDER

~ Norco 4220 Enclosure
~ Gigabyte GA-990FXA-UD5
~ AMD Phenom II X4 995 3.2 GHz
~ 8 GB Corsair Vengeance DDR3 1600 (PC3 12800)
~ 3 Supermicro AOC-SASLP-MV8

Thanks for the answer

I was thinking to go to a new server box but from your answer I better go with HP EX box. I found on the net EX475 as you said would worked. I also founded EX487 and EX495 would it works with these boxes.

Regards

If you go with either EX487 or EX495 you will need the disk sets for those servers. You would then have to perform a Server Recovery using the disks for those servers because of the hardware differences between your EX470 and the EX487 and EX495.

The other thing I should point out is the EX487 Server Recovery proceedure is the same as the EX47x but the EX495 requires you to make a direct network connection between the computer performing the recovery and the server.

I will tell you also the EX495 is the more powerful of all the HP MSS Models. While the EX487 has some advantages over the EX47x it lacks the flexibility for expanding outside the box because the eSATA port will only support 1 external drive where as the EX47x eSATA supports 4 drives and the EX495 eSATA supports 5 drives.

What you have available to you on this site is a wealth of information on the EX47x, EX48x and EX49x units. HP sold 2 versions of each server and the differnces between them is hard drive compliments between the EX470 and EX475, the same is true for the EX485 and EX487 but with the EX490 and EX495 the difference is in the processor.

The easiest way to port your drives over and get up and running is the go with the EX475. As I have already mentioned with the other units you would need to perform a server recovery using the disks for those units. If you need to perform a server recovery I would run a CHKDSK on all your current drives to make sure they are in good working order. Also mark the bottom hard drive as that is your system drive and regardless of which server you go with that drive will need to be installed the the bottom bay. The other drives and go in any of the remaining bays.

I recommend you search the forums for aditional information about the other servers your looking at so that you fully understand what your about to purchase.

_________________
Exploring the possibilities!

Migrated from WHS2011 to WS2012E: HIGHLANDER

~ Norco 4220 Enclosure
~ Gigabyte GA-990FXA-UD5
~ AMD Phenom II X4 995 3.2 GHz
~ 8 GB Corsair Vengeance DDR3 1600 (PC3 12800)
~ 3 Supermicro AOC-SASLP-MV8