I noticed that I'd lost connectivity to my EX 490 share. The three drive lights were normal (solid on/blue). The health indicator light was blinking blue. I pressed the power button on the server for a soft reset but no response. I held the power button to force power off. Turned the unit back on and now none of the hard drive LEDs light up. The health indicator light is blinking aqua blue. The network and power LEDs are solid blue. The manual doesn't seem to have any information on what a blinking blue health indicator light means. Needless to say have all three hard drive lights off and no network connectivity doesn't give me a good feeling about my primary backup server.

A search here on "blinking blue health light" should turn up lots of info. Definitely leave it for awhile, it could be doing a chkdsk on the drives. If it's not come up in a couple hours, you may want to pull the drives and run a chkdsk against them in your PC, it's possible you've got a failing or failed drive.

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Alex Kuretz
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Hi garyj ~ Welcome to the forums!

The blinking blue Health Light simply means your server has not yet finished booting and your drive lights will not turn on until WHS basically fully boots. Your issues is most likely the result of a hard drive misbehaving so try these few steps to see if you can quickly identify which drive is causing the issue.

(1) Slide out all your Storage Pool drive enough so they are no longer connected to the back plane then turn your server on. If your server boots then the issue will be with on of the storage pool drive. If the conditions remain the same then the issue is with the system drive.

(2) If the server does boot shut it off and then insert a storage pool drive and then boot the system. Do this until your system no longer boots and then remove each drive that prevents the server from booting and leaving the working drives in the server until you go through all your drives.

The most important drive to keep track of here is the System Drive the one that is located in the bottom drive bay of your server. While you can keep track of where the storage pool drive were its not really necessary because no matter where you install the in the server WHS will find them. This is not exactly the case for the system Drive.

Should your server boot with the system drive but with one or more missing Storage Pool drives your going to get a lot of errors, to you it may look like the end of the world is here even though your server just booted. Ignore these errors for now because they are the result of one or more missing storage pool drives so please do not even read them or follow their corrective action recommendations or you will most certainly have a very bad day once the drive issue is resolved.

By now you should have one or more drives but most likely just one sitting in front of you and you may even be talking to it but thats ok most others do too. What you need to do is install the drive in another computer that can read NTFS Drives. You can install it internally or externally in an enclosure or docking station. You will want to run CHKDSK /r on the problem drive(s) to correct any issues they have and in most cases its all you need to do. The Storage Pool Drives will be named DATA and the System Drive will have 2 partitions named SYS and DATA. When installed they will be assigned various letter. Running CHKDSK /r can take quite a while so its good to know.

In the event that the drive you install into your computer does not initialize or worse prevents your computer from booting. You will need to replace it. If it happens to be the system drive then you will need to perform a SERVER RECOVERY using a new drive. If its a storage pool drive it will need to be replaced and removed from WHS.

Once you correct the drive issues you should be able to resume using your server. Should you need to perform a Server Recovery you will need to ignore all errors reported by the server until you download and install all the HP and Microsoft Updates. Keep checking for updates until there are none. At that point if you happen to still have errors then feel free to correct them but to do so before the updates are complete can caused you to lose your Client Backup Data Base.

Good Luck with resolving your server issues. If you do not understand something I have written please let me know and I will try to clarify things better. The response is longer then it probably needs to but I wanted to give you enough info to cover as much as possible to empower you to get your server functional again. Should you require additional assistance please do not hesitate to come back and ask for help.

_________________
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

Thanks for the responses. I am letting the server sit with the blinking light for awhile and then try booting with but have a couple of questions. The lights for all three populated drive bays are off. Is this expected behavior while the server is running its disk repair/chkdsk? And shouldn't I expect that the server could be accessible on the network while it is going through the disk repair? I can't access the server through the console application but I suppose when I power cycled it may have acquired a different IP address? The network interface does show link and activity and the network led on the front of the server solid blue.

And finally - when you said to pool the storage pool drives to see if the boots, I assume I should leave the system disk installed? And how do I know if the boot was successful? I should be able to access the device through the server console? And the health led should stay solid blue?

Thanks,
Gary

If the server is running its CHKDSK durring the bootup it will not be fully booted thus not available on the network. The reason why you see the network light on is because its plugged in and if you were to unplug it you would see that light turn off.

If you have not set your router to reserve and IP number for your server the DHCP will assign a number and not always the same for your server once it says hello on your network. Had you reserved and IP number for your server via the router then you could easily identify if the server is active or not on the network. Reserving IP numbers comes in handy for troubleshooting network devices.

In the last part to your question, you would leave the System Drive in the server to boot from first with no storage pool drives attached, then with one and so forth. What your looking for is the drive that hangs your server during boot up and its that drive that you want to perform a CHKDSK /r on in your server. Its only takes one drive to cause an issue so by doing what I describe will save you lots of time. Before the recommendation would be to run CHKDSK /r on all your drives. This would be the best way ask it will guaranty you drives are all in good working order but its also very time consuming. So doing it the way I describe will get your server back online much quicker.

Once you do get your server back online you might want to get the add-in Home Server Smart which will give you an accurate picture on the actual health of your hard drives. Even though WHS may report the drives as being healthy in terms that that are still functional, Home Server Smart uses the Smart Data from the actual hard drive to show the actual health of the drive. This will help you replace drives before they fail when they are much easier to remove from the WHS Storage Pool then after they fail.

Here is the link for Home Server Smart: http://www.dojonorthsoftware.net/Freebi ... SMART.aspx

Another good add-in is BDBB which will allow to make a backup copy of your client data its available here on this site: http://www.mediasmartserver.net/add-ins/#WHSBDBB

While there are many good add-ins for WHS these two are a must have for anyone operating a Windows Home Server.

_________________
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

Thanks again for your guidance. One of my two (WD 2.0 TB) storage pool drives has a hardware failure. I determined the faulty drive using the steps you recommended, and then attached it to my desktop and ran chkdsk and then the Western digital diagnostics to verify the failure. I "removed" the failed drive using the server console and now am back to having my system drive and a single storage pool drive. I installed the drive diagnostic utility you recommended. I already had the BDBB but unfortunately it doesn't work with my eSATA external drive array. The backup starts but then fails almost immediately. Do you have a recommendation for an eSATA drive array that is compatible with the EX490?

Thanks again for your help.

To be honest I use an externally Connected USB Drive for my BDBB Backups. I will then copy the contents of at drive to another location before the next time I make another BDBB Backup on that drive which is a 1 TB Drive.

I mention your issue to Alex who wrote BDBB as maybe he might be able to explain why your having an issue. I am certain he would want to hear about it just to rule out his software.

Which eSATA enclosure are you using and how do you have it setup? For WHS you would want it to be a JBOD Setup to work well with the Drive Extender in WHS which manages the storage pool.

_________________
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

Check the Event Viewer on the server for error messages from BDBB about the eSATA enclosure. Give me the make and model if it's causing issues, and screenshots of the BDBB screen could be helpful.

_________________
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?

I can't access the server to get any error codes??

SteeVeeDee, you seem to be having some kind of problem, but have brought it up on this existing thread.

What king of problem are you having?
Is it the same as the thread started and if so have you followed the advise that Comp1962 detailed above?

Let us know what is happening, what you have tried and we would be glad to help if we can... I try to check the threads at least a few times a week.
Good Luck

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