Time for my little tale of the upgrade. The disks were mislabeled as seems to be the norm here in the US. Couldn't get the current connector software to uninstall so after an hour of trying everything I could think of I gave up and proceeded to do the restore.

First attempt ended with a bad install. The console first screen wouldn't populate.
Second attempt more complete but no web access.
Third times the charm and the installation completed and all worked except the ability to log in using HTTPS. Had to contact COMODO for a new certificate. After installing the new cert all is well.

Backup database seems intact and all data is there. So it took about 4 hours to work thru all this but in the end the server seems stable and all default screens in console work. Several of my addins are giving me problems but I will slowly work them out.

yowzer

My upgrade to 3.0 on an 485 went well, overall. Followed the instructions and everything went off without a hitch. FWIW, my disks were labeled correctly.

I did run into the Twonky 100% CPU issue and had to stop it and remove my Video folder from being indexed to resolve the issue. Running great now. I haven't had a chance to nail down exactly what within my Video folder is causing the issue.

I just spent a few hours diagnosing various problems to install the latest software. I inserted the disk, ran WHSRecovery.exe, and followed the instructions. The instructions to uninstall HP MediaSmart Server and Windows Home Server Connector was a little confusing because I wasn't certain whether it meant to uninstall them from the computer used to install the update or from the server. HP Media Smart Server is installed on both the desktop and server, but Windows Home Server Connector is only on the desktop so that was somewhat of an AHA! moment.

The weird thing is that after powering on the server, inserting the paperclip into the switch, and clicking Next, WHSRestore.exe consistently crashed with error 0xC0000005. The only reference I could find to this on Google mentioned the guy fixed it by installing and running it from Windows 7. I thought this was weird because I was running it from Windows 7 x64. Rather than spend any more time trying to diagnose the problem, I ran it from Windows XP in a virtual machine.

After installing the software and rebooting, WHSRestore.exe couldn't find the server. Fortunately the help file specifically mentions opening port 8192 in the router and that fixed the problem. Unfortunately at the very next attempt (after rebooting again) it couldn't find the server again. I suspect it was trying to use a different port, so I so just slapped the HP MediaSmart Server into a DMZ and that fixed the problem.

A little churning later and I had Windows Home Server completely accessible from the LAN, but it wasn't accessible from the Internet. I initially thought that meant it had wiped the remote access settings, but it turns out that was not the case. The remote access settings were completely intact but I couldn't access the server from the Internet for some reason. I tinkered around with port forwarding rules to no avail and finally slapped it back into a DMZ and that still didn't fix the problem. As a last resort, I finally removed and reconfigured the domain name and it's now accessible from the 'net.

Having said all this, I think overall the upgrade was relatively painless. From what I've checked so far, all of my backups and data are completely intact. It even picked up the existing add-ins in the Software\Add-Ins folder so all I had to do was click to reinstall them. The one disadvantage to the upgrade is that Windows Home Server Console is a lot slower, although it is a lot prettier.

I'm curious about this because I noticed several people here seem to indicate the console is more responsive. On my computer the console is about as slow as a snail drudging through molasses in February. The weird thing is that I just noticed demigrator.exe, qsm.exe, and wmccds.exe have had the CPU pegged at 100% for the past hour or so and I'm seeing a ton of disk activity in Disk Management. The drives aren't quite so equally balanced now either. Before the update all four drives were at about 40% each, now I see 26% on Disk 0, 57% on Disk 1, 58% on Disk 2, and 31% on Disk 3. I'll let it run overnight and see how it's doing in the morning.

lothan,

Are you using media collector. If you are this is the same problem I was having. If you do have it turned on I would immediately turn it off and reset the database to rescan so it shuts off. That program filled up my primary drive zero to 99 % twice and took days to pretend to move data to other drives while it really did nothing. If it does find media data you don't have on your server it will put it on one drive as it likes to cluster like programs together.

Glad to hear your success story. I'm just curious which restore/recovery tool you used since I've lost some files as well.

_________________
MSS EX485 • MacBook 2.0 • Mac Mini 2.26 • MacBook Air 1.86 • Home-built WinXP P4 2.4 DVR • AppleTV

My Upgrade story
By Bad Wolf


My Upgrade story is a nice one. I read all the stories on here, and decided to just move all my data off the 485, and run the 3.0 with a factory restore. This took less then an hour.

I forced a bunch of windows updates, and HP updates to get to Patch #3.

I did notice immediately, the Console was much MUCH more responsive. It was extremely noticeable. I like the new look.

Next thing I did was put all my data back on, sans my pictures and MP3's. I wanted to see how the medial collector functioned.

All of my media, and I have a BUTT load of pictures and MP3's, collected successfully within 12 hours.

This used to take DAY'S. This used to have errors. My playlists would be jacked up.

This worked PERFECTLY. I turned on Twonky. It played great to the PS3 and the Xbox 360.

I used the website from the office the next day. It was also faster, and more accurate in playing content. VERY VERY HAPPY!

Then when I got home from work that night, I was going to setup the Amazon S3 account I set up 2 weeks ago.

Yeah, a little pissed off there, still watching that Amazon thread waiting for a work around.

PS3 media server installed and worked without a hitch.

All in all, I am very satisfied with this upgrade. I was back and forth in doing the chip upgrade the site laid out before the upgrade, but speed, for me, has definably been taken care of.

Received the disc set a couple of weeks ago, but decided to hold off until after my taxes were done (had Taxcut installed on the HP 487 so I could help with several friends returns from their homes)

Today I pulled the trigger and did the upgrade. All went smooth except:
After it was done, I had to change the IP back to the statis number I had the router set to forward to.
That made me need to run discovery.exe from the client computer I did the upgrade from. Yes, I had uninstalled the old connector and hp software first.

Remote access router test was failing, I had to open the ports in the WHS firewall. Then all was golden.

Total time about 2 hours including the minor issues.

***And I was wrong about the length of time.****

I was in the remote desktop ans realized there were windows updates waiting.
Power Pack 3? Really? That wasn't cooked into the new disks?

Add another 20 minutes for all of the updates to download and install. 2:20 total.

My upgrade story has been a bit of a work in progress. I read the postings but have little to add to the collective wisdom. I have an EX485 (stock, no hacks) with 5.75 TB of storage. (my title below is old) I am running the software from a HP9770with an Athlon X4 processor running Windows 7 64 bit. I unloaded the previously connector software and even rebooted the PC to make sure the de-install was completed.

When I initially tried to do the 3.0 upgrade, I kept getting the "No server found" error. I read the upgrade posts and do not have a firewall issue (all on one subnet internally). I also had pushed the power button and then the reset button, once the indicator is blinking between red and blue slowly, until it is blinking aqua and white quickly. It went through the whole search cycle and then gave me the "No server found" error over and over.

I then read further and decided to unplug my external USB back up drive and CD after some good advice mentioned earlier in this thread. Eureka. It found the server, then I got the message that the installation failed because my PC could not talk to the server. Step by step I guess. I attempted the install one more time and it finally recognized the server and loaded the software. Another problem arose when I ran the connector software. I waited about ten minutes for the server to boot multiple times if it needed. The light on the front was solid, so I tried to load the connector software. Again, I got the “cannot find the server” error. I tried several attempts. I eventually hard booted the server and finally then it recognized the server and software loaded.

Thanks for the good advice and the inspiration to get this loaded.

_________________
__________
Network Neophyte
HP 485 MediaSmart Server (stock no hacks, yet) 5.75TB

My EX470 Upgrade: Background, LE-1640 and 2 gig ram and Bios tweak.
Added (2) 1 tera harddrives, system drive as shipped.
635 gigs of , photos/videos/apps/music with dup on, backing up 3 windows PC's.
Static IP and renamed the server name.
Netgear FVG318 wireless router with IP's set to mac on each PC including server.

HP 3 Upgrade disks mis-labeled.
Uninstalled the connector off all PC's, error, try again, good.
Used a 1 tera usb to save all my files in the shares. [1 day]
Deleted all files in sharges and turned dup off. Pulled 2 extra drives.
Booted, Used win XP 64bit PC to Restore/reset server, could not find server, opened ports 8192 TCP/UDP booted, found server, factory reset.
1.5 hours loading/rebooting and updating.[1 day] Twonly/itunes/etc. all on. Turned off.
Download fan control because CPU temp was 42C. Set to -25 CPU at about 35-40 depending on load.
Added 2 extra drives back, made needed folders, installed connector on needed PC's.
Copied all files from USB back, turned on Dup. [1 Day]

Just letting everything settle in now. Temps go up when PC's are backing up, but it is the first time.
Twonky found video and is working well, I kept convertor off as all the videos are good the way they are.

RDP and screens are double faster, except when PC's are backing up, but, again first time.

I'm glad I updated. The user accounts made more sinse this time and everything is smoother and faster.
Well, network traffic is not as fast as usb, but it works. Wireless videos to my Samsung Plasma.
All in all, 3 days to upgrade and no file or hair loss.
Now I have a backup of all files, cool. Goodluck all.

_________________
[X510 CPU/RAM/All 2 TB Red's] [X510 CPU/Sync'ed Backup/All 2 TB Hitachi's]
[X510 /2 in box]
[X710 LIAN LI DIY W2016E] Stablebit Drivepool [EX-503 LIAN LI 5-bay USB3 External]
Fear the Cloud

My upgrade to the 3.0 went very smoothly. I devated from using the recovery button on my EX470 in that I pulled my system drive out then waited for the system to goto into recovery mode. I have a monitor on my server so I can see the status of my server.

The recovery only took about 1 hour and then I proceeded to run the server updates to bring it current before attempting to actually use it for anything. The EX470 is no longer my primary server so I can afford to wait a bit longer then most but the one thing I do use it for is to backup my client's so its still has an important role to play here and it reduces some of the work load off my ProLiant.

My EX470 has an AMD Duel Core BE2300 installed and one of the first concerns was with the processor temp. Since it was reported that the MSS FAN CONTROL for the EX47x was not compatable with the 3.0 I was planning on putting a fan in front of the EX470. However before I got around to installing the 3.0 Alex released an updated MSS FAN CONTROL program for testing which I was allowed to help with and then shortly after that he released the working version and its one ADD-IN that an EX47x user can not live without.



The next thing I had to work on was getting Remote Access to this server and maintain the ability to do so with my ProLiant. I completed this task over the weekend. I have a Private Domain with TZO and both my EX470's have their own domains with TZO using the HP/TZO Provided domains. Anyway I had to do some creative port forwarding with 3389 and 3390 for RDP connections and had to manipulate the 443 port letting 443 go straight to the EX470 and then make external port 444 goto internal 443 port on the ProLiant. I really did not like this but it was the only way to get the servers to play well together. Basically I use the ProLiants Landing page to control the access to both servers and used Whilst to create the Links on the ProLiant Landing page. This works well accept I need to get rid of that LOGIN BUTTON or figure out how to redirect where it goes because it goes straight to the EX470 and I get a certificate error.

So now I can access both servers via the internet no problem which allows me to play with the new 3.0 features. The one thing about setting up remote access is that TZO gave me a free year with the domain I previously owned and I now have 2 sets of keys for the exact same domain name which I found weird but who cares its working.

At first I wanted to play with the photo publisher but I was getting an error that it did not exist. I found a fix that did not improve my situation so I removed it. I was on the EX470 and found if I just created something it would work and it did and I like it much better then the Photo Webshare which I stopped using months back when I learned HP was dropping it from the 3.0. It was only a minor issue and its working.

I did not encounter any issues with Twonky. To me it seemed Twonky ran faster in the 3.0 then in the 1.3. I will also add I do not really need to run Twonky but for the spirt of the upgrade I decided to let it run. I found the server to be very responsive with the 3.0, it was backing up my clients and I felt it was time to setup the in home media streamer and video collector and video converter.

I liked the Media Streamer alot. I think its a nice touch and it works extremely well. This is how I know it works well. The video converter is running doing its business and it puts a heavy load on both my cores 80+%, I connected to the server via the internet with a netbook running with a mobile broadband connection. I was able to play the music without issue, view photos although there was some delay in waiting for the stuff to display but then again this is to be expected when your CPU is heavily loaded but it was faster then I antisipated. Once I had a couple movies converted I was able to play them and quite pleased with the results.

What I am not exactly happy with the performance of the Video Converter. The results are good but the amount of time it takes to process a video seems way too long. Now this could be something I set up wrong or overlooked but for now my test batch of movies seems to be taking days and days to process some 17 AVI movies. I also put 4 MKV's on the server to see what if anything it might do with them but it may take quite some time before I know. Anway I do not require this function because I stream all my MKV's via ORB online but I will say I have an interest in seeing what MP4's look like for streaming online so its of interest for me.

I have not installed many ADD-INS yet but one thing I have noticed is that I am not seeing any activity on the Network Utilization on the System Status. I can however see this using the ADMINIME ADD-IN which I found to be very useful but I have to wonder if its caused the problem with that indicator. Maybe someone will be able to determine this to be true or false as time goes by.

I only have one issue I consider annoying and that is with the Server for iTunes. When I select it, the page loads on the console then abruptly stops and when I click MORE INFORMATION it gives me a ton of things to look at. Maybe I missed something maybe I did not. I will be honest in that I am not a user of iTunes and have not been so since my son drove me crazy with his iPOD. While this feature is not of great importance for me I still think it should work. Maybe someone will be kind enough to point me in the right direction one day or someone will post something about this I will pickup on but its not the end of the world.

All I know is my upgrade experience was positive. It was fun and I would recommend this upgrade to anyone wanting to enhance their servers features. It breaths new life into an older unit and while I had to wait for it to be released it was well worth the wait. What I do not know is how the upgrade will work on an EX47x with the stock processor. I have elected not to install the 3.0 into my other EX470 at this time but may elect to do so in the near future just to see how it works out.

If anyone who has an EX470 with a stock processor desires to know how the upgrade will work out for them just let me know and I can move my drives into the other EX470 to see how it runs. This would provide some additional information for those who need it.

_________________
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 used the restorer utility from http://www.restorer-ultimate.com/download.shtml. hope t helps. you can first use the trial version to see if it can find your lost file and only then think about purchasing it

I performed the upgrade on my EX485 last night. I ordered my disks last week and there were labeled correctly. The only issue I encountered was the LEDs did not properly indicate Recovery Mode even though it entered Recovery Mode. CPU usage was not affected upon installation but I did notice the hpmss.exe service seemed to use a bit of memory. For what it's worth, I printed of the guide from HP and used that to help me with the upgrade.

Cheers from Claremore, OK!
Dave

_________________
HP MediaSmart EX485: 4x Western Digital WD20EURS 2.0TB

After solving my Drive Extender Migrator Service issue on the MSS yesterday afternoon, I was finally able to update my EX470 to the HP 3.0 software last night. After reading through this thread, I decided that patience was going to be my motto for this software upgrade. Knowing that I was going to have to uninstall the connector software from the source computer, and not wanting to uninstall the connector software from my main PC and backup PC which are connected to Andromeda, I decided to use my laptop to to the install. It turns out that I also had mis-labled disks, and after locating the corrrect disk, started with the install. The first warning indicated that I should not try the install via wireless, so I turned off the wireless adaptor on the laptop and connected it to the same switch where my MSS and Andromeda are connected.

There were several unused cables attached to the switch, so I removed all of the cables except for the cables running to the MSS and Andromeda. I re-started the install only to discover that the laptop could no longer find the MSS. Looking around a bit, I discovered that none of my computers could find the MSS nor could they find Andromeda. I re-started my cable modem, router and all switches with no luck. In looking around to try to diagnose the problem, I realized that supid me had disconnected the main cat5e cable from the wall to the switch effectively removing the MSS and Andromeda from my network. After re-connecting the cable from the wall to the switch and an hour of lost time, I was back on track to install the 3.0 software. The laptop was now connected via hard wire connection to the same switch as the MSS and could find the MSS.

I had decided to do a factory reset and completely start fresh with the MSS and the 3.0 software, so I began the install. The initial install took about 1.5 hours or so. Then the connector install and updates took another 1.5 hours or so. When the software was completely finished installing, It had been approximately 3 hours from start to finish, (4 hours considering my self imposed snafu). Everything appears to work fine. The console seems more responsive and seems to load faster than the original. I turned off Twonky, and deleted the McAfee addin. I then turned off the backup to the laptop which had been created during the install and re-connected the laptop to Andromeda.

This morning I woke to find my MSS off. Actually it was only asleep but would not wake on lan, so I had to re-configure the NIC settings (wake on lan was turned off). I installed a few addins (disk management, advanced admin console, and fan control). I re-set the IP to the same static IP that I was using before the upgrade, and re-added the MSS to my main workgroup. I also re-added all users. Everything is back to normal with my MSS. The 3.0 upgrage itself went on without any issues at all. It just took a long time.

It's amazing how much time we can lose with a simple problem like a disconnected cable! I'm glad your upgrade went largely smoothly, but I'm surprised it took so long. How many drives did you have connected?

_________________
Alex Kuretz
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