About a month ago my EX-485 SYS drive died. With some great help from this forum I installed a new drive, did a Recovery, and all was well. Until now

Last night I found the lights on my EX-485 doing the following:

a. No lights for about 5 seconds
b. 1st and 2nd lights solid blue, and 3rd (right most) flashing alternating blue and red for about 5 seconds.
c. Repeat "a" and "b" over and over.

When in "a" the EX-485 is silent. When in "b" you hear the drives spinning up.

I left it off over night and through today, and just now powered it back on again. To my surprise it booted up just fine. I quickly logged in and checked the SMART utility and it showed that both of my drives are healthy. I checked the EX-485 fan and temp status and both fans are running and temp was around 54C. The machine ran fine for about 20 minutes with me monitoring the drives and temp. Then, just as I was about to connect my external drive to do a backup, my connection to the server terminated and it was back into the "a" "b" loop.

It doesn't appear that my drives are bad. My fans seem to be running. Temp doesn't seem to be high. Any ideas what could be causing this?

Health indicator codes when the indicator starts as solid red
1 aqua white, 3 red : Operating system USB boot failed. Check that lowest USB port on back of server has boot source.

1 aqua white, 4 red : Recovery mode failed. Contact HP Support at http://www.hp.com/support.

1 aqua white, 5 red : Multiple boot failure. Contact HP Support at http://www.hp.com/support.

1 aqua white, 6 red : Service code. Do not hold state button longer that 3 seconds. Shut down and repeat.

Codes when the indicator starts as blinking red
2 aqua white, 1 red : BIOS corrupted. Repeat power-on to validate. If repeats Contact HP Support at http://www.hp.com/support.

2 aqua white, 2 red : Memory failure. Contact HP Support at http://www.hp.com/support.

2 aqua white, 3 red : BIOS recovery source not present. Contact HP Support at http://www.hp.com/support.

Maybe this will help, very sorry to hear that server is not happy (It seems like the EX-48? had lots of problems)
Goodluck

_________________
[X510 CPU/RAM/All 2 TB Red's] [X510 CPU/Sync'ed Backup/All 2 TB Hitachi's]
[X510 /2 in box]
[X710 LIAN LI DIY W2016E] Stablebit Drivepool [EX-503 LIAN LI 5-bay USB3 External]
Fear the Cloud

Thanks for the code list. I'm having a bit of trouble figuring out where mine fits.

WHEN I FIRST POWER ON THE EX-485, The health light looks like this:

a. A very brief flash of red.
b. Alternating blue and red, each color flashing 5 times (each staying on longer than the brief flash in "a" above).
c. Health light goes out for a second or so.
d. Light flashes blue some number of times. Anywhere between 2 and 8 times. (note: it doesn't always do this step)
e. All lights go out for a couple of seconds and then the flashing starts again, but with a slight difference.

After "e", it starts the same a-e cycle except that now "a" is a brief flash of a white or aqua white light instead of red.

So, I don't know what to think. It doesn't seem to fit any of the scenarios in the code list that you provided. It is also interesting that after I let it sit for awhile it will boot up and run for about 20 minutes before it fails again. I'm not sure how long it has to sit, as both times I have left it overnight. This would seem to indicate to me that it might be heat related, but as I mentioned in my first post, I have monitored the CPU temp and it seems normal. Still, it seems to take some amount of "off" time before it will boot again. Note that it is only about 65 degrees in the room, so it isn't in a hot environment.

I just read through some of your posts. You have been through some stuff with that server.

The drives are Good? IE smart data is good?
The server can breath? all fans running and no dust bunnies blocking any holes?

If I was you, I would label the drives so I could put them back, then pull all of them, format another drive you might have just to test a reset with just 1 known good drive and see if it does the same thing.

If it works OK, well then, you got some data to backup, a reset to do and move the data back.
If not, well most likely it's a hardware problem.
Have you updated anything on it? Ram / CPU ya might try the stock stuff, your really just in trouble shooting mode now.

Goodluck I hope the reset 1 drive works for ya.

_________________
[X510 CPU/RAM/All 2 TB Red's] [X510 CPU/Sync'ed Backup/All 2 TB Hitachi's]
[X510 /2 in box]
[X710 LIAN LI DIY W2016E] Stablebit Drivepool [EX-503 LIAN LI 5-bay USB3 External]
Fear the Cloud

Thanks again for the reply. Yes, to all questions. SMART says drives are healthy. No errors reported. SYS drive is new (a few weeks ago), while DATA drive is original, but again, reporting healthy. Pulling both drives and doing CHKDSK in a desktop PC reports no errors. WHS Console says both fans are running and temps look ok. No dust bunnies clogging anything up.

This almost feels like a power supply issue to me. Maybe the power supply is heating up. Does it have its own fan, separate from the 2 fans that WHS console reports on?

I believe all the power supplies on these servers have one of those little fans.
Again, I would try a reset on a spare drive if ya have one. And if it's the ps fan the replacements ones on ebay are great, I just bought another one to have as backup.
http://www.ebay.com/itm/HP-mediasmart-s ... 4140912597
Goodluck

_________________
[X510 CPU/RAM/All 2 TB Red's] [X510 CPU/Sync'ed Backup/All 2 TB Hitachi's]
[X510 /2 in box]
[X710 LIAN LI DIY W2016E] Stablebit Drivepool [EX-503 LIAN LI 5-bay USB3 External]
Fear the Cloud