Yesterday I awoke to an inaccessible Home Server. The health indicator light was blinking blue and the hard drive light bars were off. After attempting a restore, I called HP Support and spent an hour attempting to resolve the issue. The technician was very knowledgeable and helpful but were unsuccessful in getting the MediaSmart to enter Recovery Mode. The technician suggested I may have a failed system board since it will not boot into Recovery Mode. Is there anything else I can do to either verify this or get my server to successfully boot?

Some of the things we tried while attempting to enter Recovery Mode: booting with all hard drives, booting with no hard drives, booting with system drive removed, booting with only the system drive, attempting recovery process from Windows 7 x64, attempting recovery process from Windows XP, switching network cables, attempting recovery process networked directly to the MediaSmart... The last thing we tried was checking the router's DHCP table to see if the MediaSmart would show up as MININT in the DHCP lease table. No such luck. Before calling HP, I removed all four drives and ran CHKDSK on another computer. I also ran a WDDIAG Quick Test and everything passed. Throughout all this, the power light was blue, the network light was blue, and the health light was white (after completing boot process).

After the call with HP, I disassembled the MediaSmart, removing the drives, backplane, power supply/system board, memory, and coin-cell battery overnight. After reassembling everything this morning, I powered the server on and the power light was blue, the network light was blue, and the health light was off. Power-cycling the server resulted in a blue power light, blue network light, and red health light. I pressed the Status/Recovery button and got two white lights followed by a red light which indicates a corrupted BIOS. Power-cycling the server again resulted in the blue power light, blue network light, and white health light.

Does anyone have any other suggestions before I try to find a new system board? The HP Technician said the EX485 is End-of-Life and HP doesn't stock any spare parts or offer a repair service.

Cheers from Claremore, OK!
Dave

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HP MediaSmart EX485: 4x Western Digital WD20EURS 2.0TB

There is a way to re-flash the BIOS on the EX485 but you would need a valid BIOS file to do it and its sort of a process but if you perform a Google search on the EX485 BIOS you should be able to locate the procedure on how to do it.

However just to make sure just try one more thing:

With all the drives removed from the server, turn it on. See if it boots into its recovery mode which you can see on the health light blink code but as you know when the server does boot into its recovery mode that it will show up on the DHCP Listing with a name starting with MININT followed by other things. If the server boots into its recover mode but is not seen on the router or even one of your clients then please check the Servers NIC for LED Activity.

See what you come up with. If the server turns on and you get an error on the Health LED that's not a BIOS Failure Code then send me a PM and I will have you download something to try to boot your server from a USB Flash Drive to see if we can get your server to boot.

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Exploring the possibilities!

Migrated from WHS2011 to WS2012E: HIGHLANDER

~ Norco 4220 Enclosure
~ Gigabyte GA-990FXA-UD5
~ AMD Phenom II X4 995 3.2 GHz
~ 8 GB Corsair Vengeance DDR3 1600 (PC3 12800)
~ 3 Supermicro AOC-SASLP-MV8

Thank you for the response.

With all the drives removed from the server, it powers on, goes through what I imagine to be POST sequence and the the power light is blue, the network light is blue, and the health light is a solid white. The NIC LEDs are illuminated / blinking and the link LED on my switch illuminates but there is no MININT in the DHCP leases. When I run the Recovery utility, it always says No Server Found. I tried running the utility from the DVD and from a copy on the client's hard drive.

It seems no matter what I do, the server LEDs always are power blue, network blue, health white. Any other ideas?

Cheers from Claremore, OK!
Dave

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HP MediaSmart EX485: 4x Western Digital WD20EURS 2.0TB

Dave sounds like the SMI is not working properly. Only one way to find out and that's to obtain a copy of the EX485 SMI and place it on a Bootable USB Flash Drive. Place the Flash Drive in the bottom rear USB Port and turn the server on with no drives installed. If I am right then you should see the server on your network and if not them maybe there is something else wrong related to the BIOS but I suspect its a SMI issue.

_________________
Exploring the possibilities!

Migrated from WHS2011 to WS2012E: HIGHLANDER

~ Norco 4220 Enclosure
~ Gigabyte GA-990FXA-UD5
~ AMD Phenom II X4 995 3.2 GHz
~ 8 GB Corsair Vengeance DDR3 1600 (PC3 12800)
~ 3 Supermicro AOC-SASLP-MV8