Office Depot Sells Aptiva USB Keyboards for under $10. They are just basic keyboards but are very comfortable to type on.

_________________
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

I bough a roll up keyboard, but it doesn't seem to be the issue. I started a separate thread to no steal from this, as my cause/solution may be different

_________________
MSS 487 3X2.0,1X 250HDD SW2.5
JBOD 4.5tb
Main PC-WIN7 pro I7 3770K
netgear WNDR3800
Trendnet Gigabit switch
Networked receiver SC1222k
Roku XD player
1 HTPC- win7-32
2 HTPC WIn7 64 ( i5k i7)
Dell I5 note book

JBick,

Thanks for the suggestion. I reseated all of the drives and the memory. Still powers up to flashing blue health. I backed up my data to another device and went ahead and attempted a server recovery. According to the recovery program, recovery completed successfully. The recovery program then needed to restart the MSS. Well, low and behold, the machine restarted but got no further than the now familiar flashing blue light.

Any other tips?

Thanks,
Datch

Got a spare drive? Try doing a Factory Reset with JUST that one drive. Should prove one way or the other whether this is a software/drive problem or a hardware problem in the frame.

(I cannot believe I have suggested that 4-5 times in different threads in the last 24 hours!)

_________________
....JBick

EX475, 2 GB, LE-1640
PC1: Vista-->W7 Ultimate/32, (D-Drive RAID-5 Array)
PC2: Lenovo Laptop, Win XP Home SP3
2xLinksys WRT54G v1.1 and 2xNetGear GS105 Gbit switch

Thanks, JB

Apologies for making you repeat yourself - it looks like there are several threads going that all deal with some variation of this problem. I will give it a try.

Unfortunately, I haven't found the cause of this problem yet. It happened again on tuesday night (patch tuesday, probably not a coincidence!) and the server was stuck on the flashing blue health light the next morning. Once again I noticed one of the drive LEDs on my TR4M was not turned on (only two LEDs were on but I have three drives), pointing once more to the TR4M somehow causing this.

I took this opportunity to try the TR4M on my desktop, to check the full SMART info of all disks inside. None of the disks report any kind of failure, nor is there anything suspicious in the SMART info. All drives were tested separately on my desktop, and work fine (no corruption or any trouble reading anything, though obviously I did not test writing to the drives).

In order to use the TR4M on my desktop, I used the two-port eSATA card that came with it (Silicon Image 3124 PCI-X). I was quite surprised to notice that the BIOS on the card can only detect the drive in slot #1! This is kinda weird since the BIOS is for creating and configuring RAID sets, and that's definitely not going to work with a single drive...

Once I booted into Windows 7, the driver was automatically installed and all drives were detected and accessible. However I did notice that the hot-plug feature of the enclosure did not work; the TR4M froze my desktop almost every time I swapped live disks during testing, and forced me to reboot. I'm not sure if this is normal, or if it's proof that the TR4M is defective...? I will email Sans Digital and see what they have to say about this.

I'm not convinced it is at fault (I've had the unit for close to a year without issues) but it's something worth looking into. Unfortunately my "live" data is too big to fit on the server itself without upgrading to 2TB drives, so I can't easily remove the TR4M to troubleshoot. Disk space gets used up so fast

I should get my VGA cable next week, hopefully that will help me diagnose this further. Unless someone else has more ideas...

_________________
Ben.

HP EX470 w/PP3, 8.0TB (2x500GB, 5x1TB+1x2TB WD Green Drives, 2GB RAM), TR4M-B
PC1: Desktop, Windows 7 Ultimate (x64)
PC2: Media Center, Windows 7 Home Premium (x32)
PC3: Desktop, Windows XP Pro SP3 (x32)
PC4: EeePC, Windows 7 Home Premium (x32)

My issue may be more similar to yours-

after seeing another thread pop up on this, I am suspecting an incomplete auto update.

I am still in the process of rebuilding my server backups after a factory reset.

_________________
MSS 487 3X2.0,1X 250HDD SW2.5
JBOD 4.5tb
Main PC-WIN7 pro I7 3770K
netgear WNDR3800
Trendnet Gigabit switch
Networked receiver SC1222k
Roku XD player
1 HTPC- win7-32
2 HTPC WIn7 64 ( i5k i7)
Dell I5 note book

Once again, the problem occurred. Patch Tuesday of course...

This time I was prepared: the MSS was hooked to the VGA cable, so I could finally see where the hang was. The MSS displayed the Windows Home Server boot screen, but would freeze just before the progress bar starts animating.

Incredibly, I managed to reproduce the issue consistently; the MSS simply refused to boot with the TR4M plugged in. As before, when it froze, one of the drives wasn't detected on the TR4M.

All of my WD green drives are the WD1000EACS model, *except* for the one that consistently failed to be detected: a WD1000EADS. As soon as I removed the EADS from the TR4M, I had a working MSS.

Does anyone have problems with the EADS drives?

The one thing I don't understand is, I bought the EADS precisely because of this problem, because I suspected a dying system drive was causing this. But right now however, it is as if the driver for the SATA controller doesn't wait long enough for all drives to be recognized, and hangs. Unfortunately there haven't been any updates to this driver since 2007, so there is nothing to upgrade...

Way back when, there used to be a BIOS option to set the detection timeout for hard drives, but that's not available on the MSS.

_________________
Ben.

HP EX470 w/PP3, 8.0TB (2x500GB, 5x1TB+1x2TB WD Green Drives, 2GB RAM), TR4M-B
PC1: Desktop, Windows 7 Ultimate (x64)
PC2: Media Center, Windows 7 Home Premium (x32)
PC3: Desktop, Windows XP Pro SP3 (x32)
PC4: EeePC, Windows 7 Home Premium (x32)

What happens if you swap that EADS drive with one in the MSS frame?

_________________
....JBick

EX475, 2 GB, LE-1640
PC1: Vista-->W7 Ultimate/32, (D-Drive RAID-5 Array)
PC2: Lenovo Laptop, Win XP Home SP3
2xLinksys WRT54G v1.1 and 2xNetGear GS105 Gbit switch

I wanted to try that, but I must first endure the Remove Drive Wizard... Not fun with big drives. At least now that the VGA cable is all set up, I can test at will and not risk losing the server. This is one of the slowest problem I've ever debugged, kinda like isolating dying memory sticks...

I'm almost tempted to cop out and use this as an excuse to upgrade to the EX490, but I don't like leaving unsolved problems.

_________________
Ben.

HP EX470 w/PP3, 8.0TB (2x500GB, 5x1TB+1x2TB WD Green Drives, 2GB RAM), TR4M-B
PC1: Desktop, Windows 7 Ultimate (x64)
PC2: Media Center, Windows 7 Home Premium (x32)
PC3: Desktop, Windows XP Pro SP3 (x32)
PC4: EeePC, Windows 7 Home Premium (x32)

You should be able to just power down the system, swap the drives, and power it back on. The data drive are NOT position-dependent.

It may be a simple solution and, either way, it will help you determine WHERE the problem is.

_________________
....JBick

EX475, 2 GB, LE-1640
PC1: Vista-->W7 Ultimate/32, (D-Drive RAID-5 Array)
PC2: Lenovo Laptop, Win XP Home SP3
2xLinksys WRT54G v1.1 and 2xNetGear GS105 Gbit switch

I actually have 6 WD1000EADS drives running, 3 are in the EX470 and 3 are in a Roswell RSV4 Port Multiplier. I also have a TRM4 but its not in use right now as it there for a new project I am working on with another server. However what I can tell you is that the only difference I can see between the RSV4 and TRM4 is the TRM4 has Sans Digital printed on the top of it. Anyway the only time my EX470 would not boot fully with the RSV4 was when I accidently plugged in a known bad hard drive but the difference for me was the server would try to boot then it would reboot.

_________________
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

That or you can simply remove one drive at a time and do a series of reboots. The worse that will happen is the server will report the drive as missing. Once your server boots with that one drive removed then try moving another drive known to be working to the bay the suspected drive was removed from. If for some reason the server does not boot then it may be a problem with that port in the port multiplier if it boots then its obviously not the case. At that point then I would try putting the suspected bad drive back in another location to see if it boots or not.

Basically isolate the drive then try to determine if the bay is bad or the drive. Then again could be an issue with the drive connection itself.

_________________
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

Hi,
I've been searching the web for a solution to the "blinking health light" issue. This thread appears to be the most informative but unfortunately no one seems to know what the cause is or how to fix. I have two 750 GB drives and both are the same make and model. I pulled both our and ran tests on the drives themselves and everything was reported as fine so I don't think it is a HD issue. One thing that caught my attention in this thread is the automatic update and I'm leaning towards to thinking that this may be the culprit since the MSS just suddenly became inaccessible from desktop and the blue light as been blinking ever since.

I am going to follow one of the suggestions in this thread and try to run the recovery CD to see if it helps any (not optimistic about it). I've already tried booting the MSS without the HDs installed and then rebooting with just one HD. Of course, that didn't work for me either.

By the way, I should add that the HD lights never come on when it is booting up. What is weird is that it knows when there is no drive in the bays after I pulled them all out so it may be getting stuck during the Windows boot process??? I have no way knowing because I don't have it hooked up to a monitor.

Welcome to the forums and I am sorry to hear about your issues with your server booting up. The blinking blue health light is an indication that your server is not booting up properly for some reason but because its headless its difficult to see what that reason actually is. As for the hard drive lights not comming on you should know they only come on after the server completely boots up.

Could you kindly provide the model of your server, any recent changes to the server that you may have done and a little history. Every little detail helps determine causes and helps others figure out corrective action. I realize your drives check out but something in the WHS is preventing your server from booting up properly. Often time performing a Server Recovery will restore your server and you will need to put in your user accounts and a few other things.

I do have some thoughts but right now I would prefer to know what model server you have as it will help provide the correct information to getting your server back up and running. For the moment the one thing I would suggest you do as a precaution is protect your data. If you have a copy of everything that was on your server then thats a good thing if not then I would make every attempt to move as much of the data off the drives as possible. You can install the drives into another computer and read them to copy the data. If you need help doing this just ask and I and others will be more then happy to guide you in this.

Remember protect your data first then lets figure out whats the best course for corrective action based on the information you provide.

_________________
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