Hi - I have had my EX475 for about three years; I ordered it from Amazon and it came with 1 TB of memory.

A couple of days ago I noticed that the server was giving me solid blues for the first two lights, but a steadily blinking blue for the third, health light. I can't find any reference in the documentation from HP for what a blinking blue means (no red, or purple, or aqua, etc.).

None of the drive lights are on (what I assume are the drive lights - set of horizontal blue lights running down the right side of the server).

As you may have guessed, I can't access the drive anymore. My desktop doesn't recognize the drive in the Network anymore, and when I try to access the server from the HP MediaSmart Server Control Center I get an error message ("Windows cannot access \\HPSERVER\ Check the spelling of the name. Otherwise, there might be a problem with your network. To try to identify and resolve network problems, click Diagnose. [Clicked -->] Error code: 0x80070035 The network path was not found") Sadly, I am running Vista.

I have tried rebooting the server a few times, and have tried disconnecting the power for a few minutes as well. I've also tried rebooting my desktop. The last time I tried this was before I went to bed approximately 5 hours ago, I just woke up and am getting the same simple blinking blue health light.

I have tried connecting the drive directly to my desktop with a USB cable, but I am not getting anything.

I am pretty inexperienced and so am baffled as to what is going on. Is there anyone out there who can help me identify my options? I am not against sending the drive or bringing the drive in somewhere to see if the data can be recovered, if that is plausible - I don't have a great sense for how screwed I may or may not be here. I apologize in advance for the fact that the conversation may need to be dumbed down a bit for my consumption, but I can promise you polite and grateful replies for anyone who is kind enough to help walk me through this stressful situation! Thanks -

Addi, were you ever able to resolve the issue?

I'm having the exact same problem. I used the 'restore' disc and my computer was able to communicate with the server and, I presume, reload the OS. After the restore install my computer could no longer see the server and was unable to install the 'commector' software. Tried several times.

Sadly, no. I was able to bring it to a friend who removed the hard drives and connected them to one of his servers, and after running it over night we are 90% confident that we were able to retrieve the data itself that was on the drive. We have since transferred the files to another external hard drive I ordered (from a different company) and are crossing our fingers that it works when I take it home and connect it to my desktop (although I originally posted in July, it's only in the last week or so that we've attempted to salvage the information).

I'm pretty bummed about the whole thing. The whole reason I got one of these in the first place was because I thought it would be safer / more robust than my computer's own HD.

Most commonly that behavior is caused by a failed or failing hard drive, there are many discussions with troubleshooting steps, search should get you started.

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Alex Kuretz
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Thanks Yakuza

Looks like Drive 1 failed (is there a way to mirror just drive 1?).

Swapped the disk out and used "Recovery Disk". The server is now on the network but during the "connector" portion of the install failed. It asks for a password even though the install never went through a 'name and password' sequence. Tried my old server password and it didn't work (it shouldn't have but ...). Did a reinstall of 'Recovery' and same problem. Before each install I deleted connector & whs.

I've searched the forum for solutions to no avail. Any thoughts?

I had the same problem recently, which was caused by a failing hard drive device...

I have a blue blinking health indicator. If it's a hard drive going bad, how do I figure out which one it is?

Install the Home Server SMART Add-In if your server will boot. Otherwise you can try removing drives one at a time and see if the server boots. Make sure you note the bottom drive as it is the system drive with the OS. A search will turn up numerous troubleshooting discussions on this with more ideas.

_________________
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?

Here is a good story...

I have the EX475. While leaving for Thanksgiving I did a graceful shutdown. Prior to shutting down, I did a remote desktop in and ran a disk utility to check the disk health. Both drives were 100%. Graceful shutdown complete.

When I got back the system booted ok, but would not stream correctly across the network. The system just sort of locked up. I could remote in at first then lost the connection.

Very ungraceful shutdown using 4 second of deep pressure on the power button. Flashing blue, no boot.

Ran a system recovery, WHS 3.0 and it completed successfully. But now I still have flashing blue on the health light.

Strange indeed.

Did you install the client connector on a PC?
The recovery is not complete till you do it on at least one client.
That is where you name the server and add a admin password.
Once that completes the flashing should stop if there are no other issues.
Also the drive lights will pulse if not complete.

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