I have a 3 year old EX485 that started to get noisy a few months ago on and off. Checking the source, it was the power supply fan slowly seizing up. Then one day ot would only power on for a bit, then quickly would only go into a cycle of powering up for 2 seconds, powering down, then repeating.

I pulled all the drives, same symptoms. I pulled the PS and tested, appeared ok voltage wise so I replaced the PS fan but still acts the same.

Any ideas?

It's possible there's some other hardware issue, but I'd probably still suspect the power supply, there are replacement options: http://www.mediasmartserver.net/wiki/in ... wer_Supply

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Alex Kuretz
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Thanks Alex, the used 485 I bought on eBay arrives today so I can get my storage back online to get my daughter's crashed Dell back up.

I'll look to buy a PS for the old server, in any case it could be a spare to the working server should that not be the cause. I tend to agree, even though the suspect PS meters out ok with pins 1 & 2 shorted per the wiki, I suspect there is a circuit in the PS that fails under load so the PS ok signal goes down then up then down. The motherboard never gets to a power on state at this point so it's very unlikely to be there. The only other suspect would be a direct short on one of the supply lines on the motherboard but that type of failure I would think rare. If this was a standard PS I could try it on an old PC but alas not to be.

Again I appreciate your insight. You have a great site.

Rats!! I got the new 485 and I pulled the stock 750GB out and put in my 4 drives (in the right order) and it wouldn't complete the OS process, flashing the blue Health indicator (no red). Only using the OS #1 drive same result. Test with stock boot drive from previous owner, it works as usual.

So following other Internet info, I used a SATA to USB to my desktop to check the WHS OS drive. Thankfully, it appears fine, with C and D partitions, files on both look and browse ok. I did a chkdsk /r on the OS partition twice with no errors. I put it back in and still the 485 boots, flashing red health on startup goes to a flashing blue (no red) and just continues to flash blue. No connector, shares, or rdp access.

I'm getting worried I may not get the machine back up to it's old self without alot of work. And I REALLY want to save the backups as my daughter wants to know why I have not restored her Dell now that the server is here. Sigh.

Any insight?

I have an EX487 and if I make changes to the drives, even something simple as leaving a flash drive plugged in, and I reboot, the boot order can get messed up. The EX485 and 487 are, for the most part, identical boxes. HP made one a "big brother" with a better CPU, bigger HDD, but they're otherwise the same.

My recommendation is to get the Gen3 debug cable, which will allow you to see what's going on. The BIOS will see your drives and definitely notice a change, but without the debug cable you cannot see any of this. Your other option would be to put all four drives in and boot into recovery mode, and then try a server recovery (NOT a factory reset) and that might get you up and running. A server recovery is supposed to be a data-safe operation.

Now that I've got debug cables on both my servers (an EX487 and an EX490), using the server is never a "blind" process again!

Even though your two servers should "technically" be identical, it is also possible that your server has booted up correctly and Windows is going through device re-detection and updating, and it may take awhile for it to come around (and require a reboot or two). An example of this is if you plug a flash drive into one USB port and it says installing device drivers, then later you plug that same flash drive into the same computer but a different USB port--and it says installing drivers again! You could always try to see if you can connect to your server via full Remote Desktop to see if the OS has actually come up.

If the boot order has gotten messed up with the different drives, the server recovery may not restore the boot order so it boots off the first disk. Again, the debug cable would be your best friend.

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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

Thanks for replying!!! I would think the boot order might be messed up but I do have the system drive that came with the unit from eBay and when I use that alone, the system does come up so I do believe the bios is set to boot off of Drive 1.

The debug cable would be my best bet for knowing what is going on and I'd gladly buy one but that will take several days and my daughter is bothering me to restore her crashed pc sooner than that, hence me trying to get the 485 up again.

I've been reading the boards and MS literature on the backup database which I could pull a copy off the old boot drive and put on a fresh drive. Would take some time but seems feasible.

Per MS Tech literature, I'm copying the D:\folders\{00008086-058D-4C89-AB57-A7F909A47AB4} backup files to a USB hard drive. I have a WHS V1 fresh install nearly done and I plan to follow the steps to delete the existing fresh backup files (pretty much none) and copy over the old backup set. Then hopefully I can restore my daughter's PC.

If I can get her PC restored, I'll have more time to debug why my old WHS boot drive gets stuck with the blue flashing health light. I've asked for a quote on a debug cable so I may take that route to figure out why if nothing else becomes apparent. Last resort would be to pull data from all 4 old drives onto the new install but I'd have to juggle quite a bit as I don't have 4 fresh drives to pop into the machine.

I think I will also try to use chkntfs /x to clear the NTFS dirty bit in case the drive is in some type of chkdsk scenario - I did leave it running for a few hours without result and I didn't hear the drive running a check but that is a possibility.

Edit: it didn't change the boot. Back to copying off the backups to the external, about half way there.

Ok, my new server has a 750GB boot disk. the backups look like they will be about 1.3TB. Argh, do I need to secure a new drive big enough to copy the backups onto D:?

EDIT: I decided to rebuild the server with a 1.5TB drive to see if that'll do it (I would have used a 2TB but didn't have one free). That should hold the backups i hope.

I'm copying the 1.3TB of backups on now. I cannot seem to find the index.4096.dat file in the shadow volumes although there is a tombstone file on D: which has me very concerned.

EDIT files copies but I never found the index files - it could be on Drive 2 which CHKDSK now finds some errors on. But copying all the rest of the files the rebuilt server recognized it had all the backups but the database had errors and asked to rebuild which it is now doing and ill take the requisite hours but I checked via explorer and it is building new index files so I am hopeful by morning I'll have the backups restored and can give my daughter back her restored Dell.

Well there we not enough files and so I was almost ready to give up. Then exploring Disk 1, I had looked in the folders directory on D but was slow enough not to look in the DE folder. There, D:\DE\folder\{backup GUID} wasthe index files I was missing along with more cluster data files, 201GB worth. So I'm copying these to the new server rebuild, nearly filling the 1.5GB drive (very, very close to filled). I hope this works, it's been a long 3 weeks.

I did it.

1.5TB of backups over 4 disks copied onto a 3TB USB drive. A new donor EX485 via eBay and two new donor drives (I tried to squeeze on the one 1.5TB but was about 2GB or so shy. I loaded the backups finally. Then no critical error. Loaded the restore disk and it started!

The indicator on the WHS box completes within 2 minutes but the server took the several hours it normally does.

My daughter is very happy she has her PC back.

Now to determine a new strategy for backups. Looks like I may rely on my home built WHS2011 and use the EX485 for backup of files.

My debug cable arrives Dec. 27th, I'll try the old complete 4 disk set again and see where WHS OS is hanging. I now believe Disk 2 is chkdsk bound and the others check clean but that one has real problems. I didn't want to try too many repair passes (I tries 2 or 3) to ensure I could pull the backup set from it.

So my new EX485 had an issue where it booted into recovery instead of HDD 1 - with the debug cable I switched the HP BIOS flash from auto to off to get that fixed.

Finally putting the 4 old drives in, I found the registry was corrupt, something you cannot find out otherwise as WHS never boots so you cannot get to fix it. I am copying off all the data from the old drives, then I'll add them and copy another. the odd drive out will be Disc 2 which had chkdsk errors. So I'll go from 1+1+2+2GB to 1.5+2+2+1GB unless I can get away with removing one drive and using in the the 2011. This server will then probably be dedicated to backup and the WHS2011 be the primary.