I just powered on my server like I usually do but the fans were really loud and the health indicator blinked 2 blue - 3 red. According to HP I should contact HP support and "BIOS recovery not present". Since there would probably be of no use to contact HP I am writing here.

I have no idea what has caused this, nothing has changed at all.

I am not even sure how the server is set up. I have two HDDs in it, and Im not sure if both are used for storage or one is system and the other storage.

I really do need the data on it. I hope anyone can shed some light on what I should do!

Hi and welcome. Sorry to hear your server is acting up but we should be able to get ya through it. Here are a few thoughts for ya.
1) Windows home server is awesome because if all else fails you can pull the drives, attach them to another pc and read them to get your data. You can attach them via a sata to usb dock or sata to usb cables or an external enclosure. ( Before you pull the bottom drive, mark it, it is the system drive and it has to be kept in that bottom bay if you take it out)
2) Most times problems are caused by drives going bad or the system can get corrupt by power failures/bumps or if you power it down by holding the power button till it turns off (the wrong way to turn off a server).
If you had the SMART addin you would have known if a drive was going bad, I am assuming you did not have that addin.

3) As far as how the drives are being used, chances are pretty good the second drive is a (pooled) drive, which means it was added to the first drive via software and they made up one big drive. So your files could be on one or both drives. If you pull them and attach to another pc you will need to go in and make the drives readable , they are set to hidden view by default so they will look blank.

4) If a drive has died you may or may not be able to get your data, but you won't know till you try.

This should be enough to get you started, at this point I would focus all my energy on getting that data, then we can worrying about getting the system up and running again.

You could try to do a recovery (if you still have the 3 cd's that came with it) but if you have a bad drive, the recovery will fail anyway.

Goodluck and shout back on what you find or if you have any questions.

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Thanks so much Gardian. Just a couple of questions before I get started.

Do I hook the HDDs up to my PC separately or together? Do I need to do this in a special way, like:

HDD->HDD->PC

Or

HDD->PC<-HDD

I hope you understand what Im trying to ask. I just don't know the word for it. Daisy chain, maybe?

And also, how do I go about making the drives readable? My PC is Win7.

You would connect them one at a time if you wish.
Just like you would connect any other sata drive to the pc.
If you have a docking station it just is easier than opening the pc.
Now when you browse to the drive you will need to enable view hidden files to see everything.
then drill down from the shares folder and you data will be there.
There also is a shares folder in the system drive and you may or may not have data in that one .

anyway while you have the drive connected to the pc you could run chkdsk to see if there is a problem with one of them.
If I was to gamble I would guess the system drive is the culprit.
Which means replace it and or run the recovery disk to re-install WHS.

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In win 7 you click the start button and type folder in the search box. You will see the Folders Options at the top. Click on that and the click on the view tab. Then you can see the hidden folders tick boxes, when your done you just put it back so it will hide all the system stuff.
Hope this helps.
I would 2nd on the bad system drive, that is a common thing, it's always nice to have a extra drive around for a quick replacement.
You can go with a 1 or 2 tb drive to replace that system drive with if you want. There are lots of info on Recovery in many threads here.
Goodluck hopefully you will be copying data soon.

_________________
[X510 CPU/RAM/All 2 TB Red's] [X510 CPU/Sync'ed Backup/All 2 TB Hitachi's]
[X510 /2 in box]
[X710 LIAN LI DIY W2016E] Stablebit Drivepool [EX-503 LIAN LI 5-bay USB3 External]
Fear the Cloud

If your server is having a BIOS problem then that's a totally different issue not related to the condition of your hard drives. Did you happen to have a USB Drive connected to your server with a similar BIOS maybe on the drive that maybe the server may have attempted to boot off of. This could happen if the system drive may not be bootable but I believe to reload the BIOS you would need to perform a certain key press sequence when the server boots up.

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