I would certainly follow Gardian's advice here. While I've been testing WHS 2011 on my EX487, it's also serving as a backup of my EX490's shares. I would be really unhappy to lose everything, so with DE on the 490 and StableBit DrivePool on the 487, my most important files are backed up in quadruplicate, on completely separate boxes.
Now to look at other potential failures.
As many folks have noted in various posts here, and on other forums, HDD failures are certainly a cause for problems. I do NOT attribute this to be a fault of HP's MSS servers, because a failing disk can cause a problem for ANY Windows box. I think it's more of a Windows phenomenon, rather than an MSS one.
In my experience, if Windows tries to access a disk that is experiencing problems, especially during the boot sequence, it can theoretically sit there for hours, or forever (whichever comes first), performing retry operations on the disk. Unless the disk dies outright, so the OS no longer "sees" it, or the disk miraculously starts behaving again, Windows can just sit there spinning its wheels, leaving you wondering what's going on. If you don't have the luxury of a debug cable, and Windows is hung in the boot process, you'll never know.
In your case, it seems that Windows booted far enough that it got through the boot sequence, but now the aforementioned phenomenon occurred while Windows was starting various services. WHS has a number of services, some of which are dependent upon successful start of others. For example, the WHS Storage Manager is a critical one for things like WHS Computer Backup, WHS Drive Letter, etc. The Storage Manager service will enumerate and access the connected drives, as will the backup and drive letter services. If the troublesome disk is accessed, the service process could get stuck, and thus other services may fail to start...or get hung up waiting for the troubled disk to either die or start behaving, allowing the logjam to break free.
Disk errors detected by Windows will show up in the System event log, not the Application event log. You'll notice them right away if you have any posted by "disk" or "ntfs" -- these are telltale signs of POTENTIAL disk problems. NTFS errors often indicate communications lost with a disk (i.e. delayed write failed, system failed to flush data to the transaction log, corruption may occur, etc.). These are usually in the form of warnings, and can appear in small clusters, or big batches of hundreds. Events posted by "disk" are usually errors, instead of warnings, and they will often say something like "disk \\device\harddisk1\D has a bad block." These too will appear in clusters, and in a serious failure situation, big batches.
I wrote an add-in called Home Server SMART (WHS v1), which you can download here:
http://www.dojonorthsoftware.net/Freebi ... SMART.aspx. This tool can help identify disks with problems, or potential problems, and for a lot of folks has been successful at pinpointing disks that are dying. It works well for most folks running all classes of MediaSmart servers -- DIY servers have produced mixed results, because there's no guarantee that my add-in supports every controller, and hardware RAID is not supported at all. The tool does, however, support a wide array of USB disks. My EX490 has 4 internal and 6 external disks and the add-in shows a full suite of info for all of them. I hope this tool can help you.
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