I purchased a EX495 MediaSmart server back in May of 2010. A couple months ago the server stopped booting, and after investigation I have it whittled down to what I believe is a failed BIOS or a full OS HDD.

I plugged the OS Drive into my SATA to USB setup and the OS drive is definitely not full, so that comes off the equation.

I have tried calling HP and they can't confirm that my product exists, ( which this won't be the first time I have run into that situation ).

One person found a part list, but told me explicitly that the product did not have a mother board. Since the 1 year warranty is over, I took the product apart, and to no one's surprise I found a mother board.

I’m hoping you can help me locate a support channel where I can work with someone who knows something of this product and can get me a level of confidence in that part I’m replacing, and access to the correct part. Although I feel fairly confident that the BIOS is toast, the error codes between the book I have and the internet don’t seem to match, hence why it’s either a full OS drive or a bad bios.

This product, along with a full bank of large HDD’s cost a noticeable amount, and I’m not willing to let it slip into the junk pile without a fight.

Moving this to the Troubleshooting forum.

I think you need to start off by describing the failure mode, what behavior and symptoms are you observing, how do the LEDs behave, what troubleshooting have you performed, etc. Also view the other Troubleshooting posts similar to yours, search on topics like "blinking health light", "can't access server", etc.

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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?

Hi Russ,

Since you've got the HDD popped out, you might want to try running CHKDSK /R against the system and data partitions. If you have SMART monitoring software on the PC being used to check the disk, have the SMART utility examine the disk. You can use HD Sentinel (hdsentinel.com) -- you can download a full-featured trial version (it actually will run forever but nags you)...this can check most USB/FireWire enclosures in addition to internal disks. This tool will tell you if the hard drive has reported any internal failure conditions (i.e. bad sectors, end-to-end errors, spin retries, etc).

Assuming your HDD comes back perfectly healthy, then you can move on to the BIOS.

An item talked about a LOT on this site is the VOV Gen3 debug cable. My advice is that you get one: viewtopic.php?t=8066

This cable turns any HP MediaSmart Server and the Acer WHS from a "headless" box into one with full keyboard, video and mouse capabilities. It's a bit pricey ($80 USD for the video + PS/2 keyboard/mouse), but the time it'll save you is well worth the $80.

My gut instinct is that somehow the boot order has gotten screwed up and the server is booting from the built-in USB flash. My EX487 likes to do this; I've found that if I change USB disks (including leaving a flash drive plugged in the front port) and reboot the server, the BIOS lovingly (and magically) reorders my disks and somehow the built-in flash hops to the top of the boot order! Without the debug cable, I would've never been able to fix this.

In my 20+ years experience working with computers, I have NEVER seen a BIOS just die. I've seen a few killed due to a botched BIOS flash, but if your BIOS just up and died for no reason, it'll be the first (for me). Without a debug cable there's no way to tell, unless you knowingly tried to flash the BIOS right before the trouble started, in which case the BIOS flash may have failed.

Shoot Charles an email, per the instructions in the linked article. He ships fast upon payment, and expedited shipping is available. I have two--the one I ordered more recently I requested on a Monday--the next day I got the invoice which I paid promptly and I had the cable by Friday. My EX487 and EX490 are both hooked to a KVM and so I never have to worry about troubleshooting blindly anymore.

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Matt Sawyer
Owner, Dojo North Software, LLC

HP EX490, 4GB, E5300, 15TB - Server 2012 - Sharing and Streaming
HP EX487, 4GB, E5300, 13TB - Server 2012 Essentials - Backups