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PostPosted: Sun Apr 01, 2018 11:03 am 
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Hi,

I have an EX490. I replaced the power supply several (with an upgraded unit) months ago after it failed to power-up. It has been running fine for a few months.

A long time ago I turned on the LED easter egg so that I can see if the unit is "alive" (the LEDS turn off and on) just with a passing glance.

In the past few weeks, I have noticed that the unit will freeze and the LEDs will also freeze. It will respond to ping, but I cannot login via mstsc or any other way. It's now happening about 3 to 8 hours after it's first powered on, even if it's idle.

Here's what I have done to troubleshoot:
1. taken out all disks, run chkdsk /r on a Windows10 box... no issues found. I also did it on the server itself using /r /x... no issues found.
2. disconnected all USB drives I had connected (a backup disk and some blu-ray USB drives).
3. ran trend micro virus scanner... no issues (hard to find a 32-bit virus scanner that also supports WHS)
4. cleaned up C: drive, there's over 1GB of free space... not an issue
5. removed all programs down to the minimum (e.g. I took off Acrobat reader, etc)
5. checked the Event viewer... nothing really interesting
6. checked fans... working fine. Also shows good CFM and voltage in the console
7. disabled backups of connected windows clients
8. ran SMART test on all disks. One data disk has 1 pending re-allocation, but this is not very uncommon.
9. cleaned out the unit to remove dust.

I cannot figure out why the system simply freezes for no reason, and why it takes several hours after it has been started.
Does anyone have any ideas or other places to look? thanks.


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PostPosted: Tue Apr 03, 2018 10:10 am 
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Nobody has replied because I guess you have tried most items.
So it could be the easter egg or something is wrong with DE the drive balancer .
I see two items left to try.
1. remove the easter egg addin.
If that is not it.
2. run recovery not reset to re-install the OS only.

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PostPosted: Tue Apr 03, 2018 11:28 am 
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Ruben Rocha wrote:
Nobody has replied because I guess you have tried most items.
So it could be the easter egg or something is wrong with DE the drive balancer .
I see two items left to try.
1. remove the easter egg addin.
If that is not it.
2. run recovery not reset to re-install the OS only.


Hi, thanks.

The "easter egg" is part of the HP version of the O.S., there's nothing to install. I have been using it for years without issue, I do not think that is the issue. I used it so that I can walk up to the unit and visually see if it's still operating normally.

I would really not prefer to re-install the entire O,S. and all of the shortcuts and such. Is there really no other log file that I can look at when something locks up?


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PostPosted: Tue Apr 03, 2018 12:55 pm 
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You shouldn't need the Led Easteregg to tell if the unit is running properly, If all the lights are on, that would tell me it is fine.
But,
If the unit is freezing and you have done everything, then all that's left is a recovery.
Sorry to say, It's windows and sometimes ya just got to do it.

How much data do you have and what drives is it on.
If I were you I would try to offload that data to a backup source, preform a factory reset with a New 2tb OS drive and then do a copy back of the data. But that's just me. I have not had good luck with recoveries and I like nice clean loads..

Good Luck and let us know how it's going.

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PostPosted: Tue Apr 03, 2018 1:45 pm 
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Gardian wrote:
You shouldn't need the Led Easteregg to tell if the unit is running properly, If all the lights are on, that would tell me it is fine.
But,
If the unit is freezing and you have done everything, then all that's left is a recovery.
Sorry to say, It's windows and sometimes ya just got to do it.

How much data do you have and what drives is it on.
If I were you I would try to offload that data to a backup source, preform a factory reset with a New 2tb OS drive and then do a copy back of the data. But that's just me. I have not had good luck with recoveries and I like nice clean loads..

Good Luck and let us know how it's going.



hi,

Yes, you do need the easter egg to see it (well, of course, you can try to login and that will exhibit the issue). When the machine freezes, the LED drive lights stop moving. The normal LED status of the drive lights for the EX490, without the easter egg, is that the lights don't turn off/on. Therefore, it would not be possible to see the difference. With the easter egg, the drive LEDs flicker off and on, therefore, when they freeze, it's possible to see the difference between a frozen and normal condition.

Anyway, that's off topic I guess. I suppose I have to reimage the darn thing.


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PostPosted: Tue Apr 03, 2018 2:52 pm 
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That is I would do.
And I hope you don't mean clone the drive in lieu of a recovery.
There is not much more to check that i Know of.

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PostPosted: Fri Apr 06, 2018 1:46 pm 
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Yes, I understand the Easter egg gives you a real-time visual indicator if the server is running or frozen.

Yep, sorry, it's windows and that is one of the down sides. Reloading and having a lots of data.
God only knows what happened, but, not only will a reload be faster then trying to chase a fix, it will probably guarantee success and it may improve performance and lower temps..
Again, sorry, it doesn't make it any easier or fun.

Good Luck Let us know how it goes and if you run into any problems.

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PostPosted: Mon Apr 09, 2018 9:49 am 
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Hi all,

Well, I did the reimage yesterday. I used a different and newer disk for the boot disk and took out the one disk that was reporting a pending sector reallocation. via SMART. So far, it has been running for a solid day or so without issue. It actually seems to respond to mstsc.exe faster too, and I think it boots a lot faster (it would seem that it was previously, before the reimage, trying to correct something that took a while to attempt). .
Then I did the 160 or so updates to the OS. Then went to work installing the other stuff I had on the server previously (I use it as a PC for ripping discs, transcoding, etc, too). It felt like 2010 all over again.


Since the product is very old running a dead O.S., I ran into some issues that I thought I'd share with others:
1. Couldn't get Java JRE to install. I used the 32 bit offline and online executables (tried both) from oracle's site, but the .exe wouldn't launch. I suspect it checks the O.S. and just silently aborted. I tried multiple JRE 8 versions and they all did the same thing. I had to get the x86 tar.gz file and untar it, then copy the directories into the C: drive and explicitly change to an absolute path in the apps that use it (I use YAMJ)
2. the remote access domain registration didn't work. I even got a new hotmail account and when I attempt to set an xxx.homeserver.com domain, it reports an unexpected error and simply does not work. However, the old domain still works, as I suspect it's bound to the MAC of the homeserver which hasn't changed obviously. However, the setup page still says domain is not configured. I can live with that.


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PostPosted: Mon Apr 09, 2018 4:24 pm 
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Awesome! Glad to here it went fairly well.
Java, The only way I could get java on was, I use firefox ESR and I could still (with a warning) get java to install. I think the last version It would not so am stuck at a previous version.
I use firefox as the front end of Serviio (my media server).

But nothing like a fresh load to get things moving. It only hurts for a little while. ](*,)

Good Luck and enjoy!

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PostPosted: Wed Apr 11, 2018 9:54 am 
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So, 5 days now... smooth sailing.

Just very odd something would have gotten corrupted after so many years of problem free operation.

Oh well, I'm convinced that if you replace the power supply on this once every 7 years and (it appears) re-image it once every 8 years, it will run forever...


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PostPosted: Wed Apr 11, 2018 10:42 am 
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Hell I reformat the drive on one desktop about once a year.
Because I am constantly downloading apps to install.
wamp,xampp versions.
After a while it just crawls.

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PostPosted: Wed Apr 11, 2018 11:30 am 
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8 years would be nice, I fell lucky if I go 5-6 before a full reload :-)
Glad to here it is still doing well.
As you know, it doesn't take much to tweak a system, I had to reload my win 2012E server last year because of some of the broken updates Microsoft was pushing out.
I tried for 3 day to fix it, googling, trying uninstalling updates, tried fixes other people in the same boat had tried and finally gave up and just reloaded it.

The sad thing was win2012E has a auto backup of the OS but I could only access the last 2-3 backups and whatever broke it was before that, so now I don't even trust the OS backups anymore.
Fresh loads fix all lololool

Good Luck and enjoy. Hopefully we can get another 10 years out of our awesome little servers. After that I will be to old to Care :rofl:

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PostPosted: Mon Apr 23, 2018 8:42 am 
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It has been weeks now and the reimage has definitely addressed the issue.


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