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PostPosted: Mon Dec 01, 2014 1:28 pm 
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I'm having trouble with my HP Mediasmart server and hoping you can help confirm the problem and help me find a solution.

My server is a HP EX485 that has been upgraded with a Pentium Dual Core processor and Windows Home Server 2011.

Recently, the server had been randomly shutting down and rebooting. The rebooting had been taking a very long time and showed the health light blinking blue. Some material I have read since seems to indicate that means that chkdsk is running.

As of this weekend, the server has deteriorated further. It is on a continuous boot lop where it turns on, the blue health light blinks, but it shuts down and restarts before it ever fully boots up.

My best guess is that the boot drive has failed. Can anyone confirm that this is likely the problem?

This brings me to my next question: I would rather avoid having to reconfigure the server and services from scratch, but being a headless machine, how do I recover from my backups?

Is it safe to assume that the recovery software included with the machine won't work since I have changed the OS?

Is it possible to write a cfg.ini file that, included on bootable USB installation media, would guide the machine through the recovery steps?

Alternately, if I do a clean install, is it possible to then recover the old backups and restore the server from that?

Should my other drives be removed while I perform these steps? I would rather avoid them being wiped in the process.

I have restored clients from the server several times, but never the other way around.

Thank you in advance for the help.

Eric


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PostPosted: Mon Dec 01, 2014 1:32 pm 
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I just noticed I posted this in the "Home Server V1" forum whereas it should probably be in the "Windows Home Server 2011" section.

Does anyone know how to move it?


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PostPosted: Mon Dec 01, 2014 2:14 pm 
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Maybe Alex will move the post to the proper area.

First can you identify the processor you used? There are very few processors you can use with the EX485 that are known to work well without having to modify the BIOS.

The LED's in the MSS will not function properly unless you install the INTEL Drivers and some software so the Blinking Blue Health Light is basically useless.

The PSU may also be causing the issue you describe and depending on what the system drive was writing data at the time of power recycle it can become corrupted and result in boot issues. Just incase you do not know the PSU in your server is a proprietary Flex ATX PSU and its very common for them to fail. On eBay you can find KDM Power and Overtek LTD Selling direct replacement PSU's.

The original recovery media that came with the server is only for WHSv1 not WHS2011 and can not be used to recover a WHS2011 server. You do need to boot the server software from the server itself. You could try installing the Server OS with the OS Drive in a Client then move the OS Drive to your EX485 but you really need to know why your server is acting the way it is first and resolve it or you will just keep getting headaches.

Best way to work with your server is to use a DEBUG Board so you can perform recoveries but I will mention that WHS2011 is a completely different animal then WHSv1 in that recoveries can be performed from backups otherwise its a full install or some type of OS Repair. Anyway you need a video output to see what is going on. If you have setup a dedicated OS Backup drive you can recover the server from that but here again you need a DEBUG Board.

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