Sorry this is verbose, but I am unsure which information might help someone give me the best solution. Though I was once a very computer savvy doing some programming in the 90's, my new profession has not afforded me the time to keep up with much.

I have an ex487 unmodified with the original two drives and no duplication of files selected -- should have just added some extra hard drive space. I loved it for its ease of use and lack of maintenance required out of the box. Other than occasional problems trying to update the annoying McAfee antivirus (I never searched whether there was a better option for this annoyance), everything has gone swimmingly for years.

Within the last month, I started having problems accessing the server on my network. Meanwhile, I had changed the location of the server and router and thought I was having wireless router access problems. Of course, after reading multiple threads after finding this site I should have known that something was failing -- my non-system drive did just that. Since I did not have any duplication and had never added additional drives, weeks of my free time has been exhausted trying to research solutions and trying multiple methods to recover a copy of all 500GB of my family photos and videos etc. I did not really care whether I lost the scheduled backups for my 2 pc desktops (1 Vista and 1 Windows 7) and a Vista laptop.

I connected the failing drive to my Windows 7 desktop via a USB connector, but I could not get a repair or checkdisk to run. Also, I was unable to repair or remove the drive through the server console. (I have read about RDP access on this site, but I do not know what that is or how to do it.)

Thankfully, I was able to get brief activity out of the failed/failing drive by removing it, turning on the server, accessing the console and then inserting the bad drive back into the second server drive bay. I tried connecting an external drive and backing up the server during the brief periods of time my files would be available before the drive would fail again -- It was very slow and didn't seem it would ever work and I couldn't select specific files that I had missed with prior tries. I tried to add a 2TB Seagate Green drive to the server's 3rd bay and then turn on duplication to see if I could recover files, but the server was no longer able to sense the available drive space or do the necessary duplication. I then tried to back up everything to my main HP desktop which was eventually successful by directly connecting to the server with my desktop via a crossover ethernet cable. I selected and dragged and dropped files to eventually recover everything (I think).

At that point, I felt I was ready to try a system recovery. I did everything as instructed in the manuals, etc. -- turned off the server which was directly connected to my Windows 7 desktop via ethernet cable, put the server recovery disk in the drive, uninstalled the appropriate programs, turned the server on and pressed the reset and proceeded with the system recovery. (I had the failed/failing drive out of the computer, and had the 2TB drive in the second bay.) The program recognized the server, and started but for many hours the progress bar did not change a single bit from just a couple of mm of green on the progress bar. In fact, my computer went to sleep while I was eating and the recovery was no longer appearing to do anything when I logged back on the Administrator profile I had been on. Therefore, I thought I would try again. Since I had (hopefully) copied all of my files, I tried a factory reset with a brand-spankin' new 2TB Seagate Green drive as the only drive in place in the system disk location. Once again, the process hung up in an identical manner.

I am not sure where to go from here. Is it something with my antivirus? Is there something I am missing or not doing right? Is there something I should try? Should I buy one of the EX495 units online before they are gone forever? Even if I could get everything back as I had it, I don't think I will need the 3.0 update (though I just found out I missed getting the disks anyway) or WHS 2011 after reading some of the reviews, but who knows. (Right now, it is seeming hopeless and I feel I am beginning to neglect my job and family.)



Main desktop: i7, 9GB RAM, 64bit Windows 7 with newest Norton 360
HPMSSServer25 Patch: HP version 2.5.13.3251

You don't want the server directly connected to your PC during the recovery process, the recovery image on the server needs an IP address assigned via DHCP. You might also try a 32-bit PC if you have access to one.

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I did as you suggested, yakuza, (connected both the 32-bit pc and the server to router and ran the recovery through the 32-bit computer). It appeared to go through with the recovery process....until it showed a failure to initialize the WHS and showed the screen below. Meanwhile, the server is blinking blue -- all lights including the drive lights.

What does this mean? Where do I go from here? Thanks for your help.

I hit the same error during the recovery process. Not sure how to proceed either. Bumping for any help. Thanks.

Ok, I tried again from a 32 bit Win7 machine wired to the network, with the internet unplugged to the router to avoid any updates by the server during the restore process.

Good news is, it got passed the error above.

Bad news: Talk of only recovery being applied to the first drive (bottom slot) is not true. Idiot me did not seat the new replacement drive in the first slot properly, so the recovery restored to the next drop up the chain. Yep, drive 2 was reformatted and my data was wiped out and replaced as another system drive.

I have pulled the drive and I am now attempting a data recovery on it, but I am not hopeful. So now, not only am I in a recovery mode for the server, I probably lost one of my data drives. I had data duplication on for all my drives. Should I bother trying to do an offline data recovery for this drive or just reformat and let data duplication bring it back?

I have reseated drive 1 and ran recovery on it (not factory reset) with all the drives in (included the dorked one above). I then pulled all the data drives and now updating Microsoft and HP software to current. After that is complete, should I put all the data drives back in (minus the drive I dorked up) to see if I can get back to my data? I don't want to make matters worse.

New system drive up and fully restored with latest Microsoft and HP patches (that is HP 2.5 for me). I put back all the data drives and replaced the dorked data drive with a new one. I am hoping duplication will bring everything back.

In the WHS console, I see all the top level directories (including one's I created), but they are empty. Server storage shows significant amount of storage labeled as "System" (about 50% or 5TB). Is this my duplication? I also see demigrator.exe running. Will this restore my files, if so, how long will it take? I probably had about 4TB worth of data.

Sounds to me like you're using an advanced format drive....

Furthermore, and more importantly, it also sounds like you ran a reset on a new system drive, and then added the data drives back to the server. If you added the data drives to the storage, the server formatted them.

Grab one of your data drives and connect it to a pc......enable to see hidden folders and go into DATA\DE\shares and have a look if your files are here.

If a drive fails in the server, you must replace it and run a recovery with all of the drives attached, except for backup drives.

whats the model on that Seagate drive??