My HP mediasmart (first gen) server no longer starts up on a reboot. The power light is blue, the network light is blue, but the drive lights are off on the server (but on on the attached eSata drive tower). I've searched the other threads, and I've seen similar issues related to either the network or .dlls in use, but people seemed to be able to access the network shares or remote into the server, I can do neither, and I can't use the console either. If I missed something and there's a thread for this, please point me in that direction.

My suspicion is that this has something to do with storage balancing (related to a hardware problem on one or more drives). For some time, I had been getting intermittent errors with some drives (I believe on the attached tower) and some file conflict errors, which I had believe were either resolved or due to other factors (iTunes monitoring left on, etc). Finally, the server started to reboot itself intermittently with no error messages. I was able to stabilize it but turning everything off, starting it up without the attached tower on, and then turning on the tower. I then deleted about 200GB worth of files to get to about 10% total storage free (thinking that perhaps the issue was that there was only 2% free). That seemed to work for a while, but the reboots started again, still with no errors. I am able occasionally to get it to boot up for about 5 minutes (before another reboot) by turning everything off and back on, I get no error messages, and I believe (but I can't be sure) that it reboots when it tries to access the attached tower to do the storage balancing. I've left it on now for 24hours with the blinking light, hoping it was doing something (chkdsk?), but nothing.

Incidentally, I used to have backup problems with this server, in that backing up PCs on the network didn't work great, and never overwrote themselves, ending up in 100s of GB of backups on the server. Eventually I turned off backups and manually deleted the backup files from the server, and everything seemed to be fine, this was months ago however. I have gotten some very intermittent errors ( 2 or 3 in the last few months) saying that the backup service wasn't working, but a reboot would solve those. Don't know if this is related.

Can anyone help with either this issue, or how I could try turning off storage balancing to see if that's the issue, or some sort of health check on the disks?
I'm hoping that I can get it stable enough to externally backup the server (1.8 TB of data, fully redundant at the moment), but it doesn't look like I can. I figure that I'm going to have to do a server reinstall, and check all of the disks individually eventually, but I don't want to lose data.

My setup:
WHS pp2, disk management add on, control panel add on, fireplay server add on, media manager add on (only the disk managment add on was added recently, but after the problems started)
First gen HP mediasmart server with 2GB Ram upgrade
4 seagate 500GB drives in the server
4 seagate drives in the attached CFI eSata tower (2x 500GB, 2x 750GB)

Thanks for any help you might be able to provide!

I'd suspect a possible failing system drive, given the intermittent failures. If you have a spare hard drive, you can try a few debug steps. I'd remove all the internal drives (label them so you know which is the system drive to put back into the bottom slot) and disconnect the enclosure. Power on the system and see if it goes into recovery mode automatically (flashing red/purple). If so, then power down the system, insert your spare hard drive if you have one, and try to do a Factory Reset onto that drive. If things work well then you can probably assume you don't have a hardware failure in the server itself.

I'd probably then re-install and connect all drives and try a server recovery onto the current system drive. If that doesn't work, then I'd format your spare drive used above, and then try a server recovery onto that spare drive with all your other drives connected.

I hope this helps, let us know how things progress.

_________________
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?

Thanks a lot, was just coming back to update - after researching all weekend, I finally figured out that this was related to the Seagate firmware problem - one of the drives in my attached tower was a 320AS 500GB drive affected by the issue. Eventually I was able to make the system see the drive as unhealthy, but as it wasn't able to calculate storage space because of the fault with the drive, I wasn't able to properly remove the disk from storage. I tried the Seagate approved firmware flash on the drive, which promptly bricked it (Seagate will be hearing from me). I then removed the missing drive from storage, and thankfully, no missing data once the file conflict errors were resolved.

So all in all, I'm happy (despite my fury with Seagate), but I'm a little disappointed that WHS didn't handle the failing drive a little more elegantly. If it had just recognized the drive as unhealthy to begin with, this would have been a half hour issue instead of a weekend-long problem. And I have no idea why it was not booting up at all for a time, or restarting every ten minutes, or why it eventually stopped.

Anyways, thanks for the suggestion, I guess we blame seagate for this one.

Thanks for sharing your resolution. I do agree that WHS doesn't do a good enough job helping the user when there are drive problems.

_________________
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?