Hi guys,

I have owned a HP Mediasmart EX490 for about 3 years now and has been running well. I'm currently having issues restoring the server since I am having problems with it. I cannot seem to get in contact with it. This only happened a few days ago when I tried to get on to it with RDC, it seem not to be responding so I restarted the box, before I restarted it there wasn't any signs of anything being wrong all the lights on the front was as per usual so I restarted it with the force shut down button at the back.

Upon restarting it the health light never stopped flashing, ususally with this server it will flash for about 2 minutes then return to normal state, however this time it never seemed to go on, I left it on over night just incase it was doing some checks, although woke up the next morning and it continued to flash. I then had a flick through the net couldn't find anything so I decided that the only option was to System Restore (Just the OS, not my shared data partition). I have done this before and successfully although this time it is being a pain.

As you may or may not know with these servers they have a mode button on the front where you stick something like a pin upon start up -- I stick the pin in upon start up during the few seconds where the network and health light flash blue and red where it should then flash purple and red, however from then that's where the trouble starts it does flash purple and red but only for around 5 seconds, where it then flashes purple. (I don't know if it is suppose to continue flashing purple and red because it doesn't -- just flashes purple.) Meanwhile the recovery software reports back after searching for the server that it cannot find it, I am really confused. I have disabled the firewall on the laptop I am working on, and have also tried it with ethernet connection and wireless, neither work.

Have also checked all the internal hardware and all seems fine.. I don't know what to do? I don't fancy clearing the entire hard drive since it has two parititions, one of them (shared files) contains a lot of my work and photos - I should of backed up else where although the last time this happened it was quite straightforward, so I presumed I wouldn't stumble in to anything like this.

Thanks for reading.

This forum topic has all the best knowledge on the server recovery process for the EX49x servers. viewtopic.php?f=25&t=6307

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Alex Kuretz
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Hi,

I have since been trying everything in that forum, but still nothing works

So far I have tried:
- Two different laptops (32bit and 64bit Windows 7)
- Disabling all other network adapters apart from the one in use
- Assigning the static ip trick
- Checked if the OS is still on the partition assigned for it (20gb) no longer there as 20gb is free of 20gb.
- Formatted the 20gb partition so it truely is clear anyway..
- Got fresh discs from HP sent to me FedEx this morning..
- Connected the HP hard drive up to a machine checked if it would read ok, all was fine.
- Server is connected to laptop with Ethernet too.

The only thing that DID work is when I put a clean hard drive in to the first bay, it then took me through to the second step, saying that it is now in restoration mode. But with the original 1tb hard drive it fails on step 4 out of 4 or sometimes 3.

When the green bar progresses I hear the server rumbling for a while then clicking which repeats until it fails, it then comes up with "Failure, click help to get more information on the problem" - I click help and it says unidentified error.

Been trying to sort this all day for 3 days, really getting frustrated :/

I don't want to use the first drive as it is only 160gb, I wouldn't mind it being used for the OS only but it will also be used for the shared files I believe, which I do not want as the shared files are on a partition on the original drive.

Just to also note I noticed a 9mb I think it was partition on the drive that I never noticed before when it was in the server, should I remove it maybe?

thanks for your reply