EX 470, SP2: just installed an external sata enclosure and 2gb hardrive. The drive was recognized, formatted and seen in the drive pool, seemed all was well. A day later I have critical fails with no backups performed and the an error "backup services cannot start" i rebooted the server still no joy. Any suggestions.

It looks like one of your drives might be missing or has failed. This can be any one of your storage pool drives. The issue could also be with an improperly seated eSATA cable. If you want to rule out the enclosure you could connect it to another computer that has an eSATA port to see if the drive is visable or not. The drive in the enclosure will have the name DATA and if you set the computer to see hidden files and folders you should see the hidden folder DE which is where WHS would store your data if it were used.

Since you mention the server being an EX470 then if one of the drives in the server were the issue it would not light up BLUE but be Red and if this is the case then your new enclosure may not be the issue but the drive in the bay with the Red LED.

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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