I have seen others with this problem, but I think my problem is a little different. My Health Light is blinking blue and I can not get into my server via the console nor remote desktop. I was watching a DVD on my media player when it locked up. I went to the computer and logged in through the console. It showed my drives were healthy, but it was slow so I went ahead and rebooted. Now it seems to just sit with the blinking blue light, but I still get warnings from the box next to the clock on the desktop when it goes through a reboot cycle. My drive lights don't light up, though I can view the contents of the drives from the network shares, but if I click to access anything then I get an error. I don't really know what's going on. I have an ex495 that is about three months old with the factory drive and I added a WD Green EADS drive about two months ago. Should I just do a Server Restore, or is there something else that can be done?

Update

I pulled all my drives except the system drive. Now the server will boot up and the drive light will come on, but the health light is now solid red. Additionally, I can remote desktop into the server and view files. I tried reinstalling WHS Connector software, but it fails every time at the configure Backup screen. It does however connect and retrieve the software from the server and recognizes my password. I cannot get a System Restore to work, it fails every time on step 2 of 4 and I have tried over 10 times. I am connecting the server directly to the computer, still I get the failure. Also, I can get into the server from VLC player and watch DVDs that I have ripped to the server, despite the solid red light. I really don't know what is going on. Any help would be greatly appreciated.

Sounds like a drive has possibly failed. I'd add your drives back to the server one at a time and see if one specific drive (in addition to the System drive which you have discovered works) causes issues. Also, if you can access the server via Remote Desktop you can launch the server console on the server and see what additional info is available.

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Alex Kuretz
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I finally got the server to do a Server Restore, but I still have a solid red light for the health. I can get into the server through Remote Desktop and I went into the Console from the server. It reports my primary disk as healthy, but my secondary disk locks up the server the minute I put it in. I guess I'm going to try to removing it from the server storage by right clicking and removing. But I want to try to recover the data as it has several seasons of TV shows and about 1.5 TB of Blu Ray and DVD rips that I'd hate to go through the process of re-ripping. I tried to hook the disk to my PC and it recognized the disk, but it said it could not access the drive unless I format the disk. It reported as a RAW file system in Disk management. Is this normal? I thought the server formatted the disk as NTFS. Is there any way to retrieve the data?

BTW the disk in question is a 2TB WD EADS Green Drive.

Your server does format the drives NTFS Format. The fact its not showing up the way its suppose to is an indication of a failed drive or something has corrupted the drive or the client you connected he drive had difficulty for one reason or another. I recommend you try connecting the drive to another computer to see what it has to say about the drive. I would rather not come to a conclusion about the drive at this point.

Now I can understand not wanting to go throught the process of ripping your movies all over again. I spent like 3 months ripping movies and I was spending hours and hours each day too so it was not a casual event for me. The question I have is did you have file duplication turned on? If you did then your movies exist on the other drive or drives if you had more then the 2.

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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

No file duplication. My server and drives are only two to three months old. I hadn't purchased any additional drives for duplication as I figured that, being brand new, I had time.

Alright, I'm resigned to the fact that I'm going to lose data on the failing drive. But I cannot get my server back to a solid blue health light. I suspect that the problem is that the server is reporting that my backup database is damaged. So I try to repair it and it says that it wants the failing drive back in. The problem is that the minute the I reinsert the failing drive, the server completely freezes and I have to pull it and reboot. Then I get the solid red health light again.

I have tried to go into the storage tab and "remove" the failing drive, but that doesn't work as I get an error that it wants the failing drive in to remove. So I put the drive in and it freezes. Rinse and Repeat.

I did a Server Restore with the failing drive left out. I thought that would reset everything so that it wouldn't look for the failing drive. That's a no go. I guess the only thing left to do is to order a new drive, attach it to my PC, save what I can off the good drive and try a factory reset. Any better ideas?

I'm about to throw this piece of **** out the window. Help.

With a missing drive your server will report a backup database issue. Most if not all the data you had on your server was probably stored on the 2 TB Drive that failed. You will have to repair the data base and with that you will lose your client data but its already lost in the drive.

What I do not know because I have never had to deal with the issue is how to get the missing drive removed since its impossible to insert the drive and remove it the way WHS wants to do it. So I will have to do some research into this matter because I know its only a matter of time before I have a drive failure with 12 drives running in my server. I will let you know what I find. In the mean time I hope others with more experience in this matter will chim in and tell you how to resolve the missing drive issue so you do not have to perform a Factory Recovery. Performing a Server Recovery will just get you that same missing drive issue.

_________________
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

Can you share a screenshot of the error message you receive, or at least the full exact text? You should not need the drive in the server to Remove it.



You didn't need to perform a Server Recovery, but have you installed all available WHS updates? You have definitely lost your data that was on the failed drive, at this point it's up to you which is the better solution, to try to discover what all you have lost, or to pull the known good data from the good drive and do a Factory Reset.

Hopefully this has also shown the value of Duplication, with 4 internal drive bays it's pretty easy to have many terabytes of data and still have it all safely duplicated. Sorry to hear you've had such a difficult time with the failed drive, it is indeed one of WHS weakest points.

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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?

So I've been fooling with the server for the last two days. I ordered a new 2TB drive and have called WD to RMA the drive that I thought was dead. I had pulled the failing WD drive the other day with the hopes of just removing the drive from the server storage and saving everything else of the server. The problem is that WHS would not allow me to remove the drive from the pool. Even though the drive was not in the machine and it was reported missing, it would not allow me to remove it from the pool despite multiple reboots. The health light was solid red and I could not get into the server except through remote desktop.

So today my new drive and my HDD dock arrived. I promptly pulled the dead drive and stuck it in the dock to see if there was any way to recover data prior to sending it back to WD. Once I inserted the drive in the dock I went to Computer Management and noticed that it reported the drive as healthy, but it showed that it wasn't formatted. I figured that there was no harm, so I told Windows to format the drive and about a minute later it reported 1.83TB available. I then moved some data to the drive to test out and it wrote to the drive and read fine.

I then put the reformatted drive back in the server and the red health light went solid blue. I proceeded to repair the backup database and that was successful. After that, WHS would allow me to connect trough the WHS Connecter software instead of through RD. I then went to remove the drive from the pool and WHS would not allow it. I got an error message that there was not enough room to move the files and I couldn't remove it, even though there was nothing on the drive. So I inserted the new 2TB drive. Still no go. Finally, I went to my shared folders and the files that were on the WD drive still showed but were said to be missing when I tried to access them. I "deleted" them from the shared folders and then tried to remove the drive, but still got an error from WHS.

So I guess I am curious. What could cause this behavior? Currently, I am moving files off the good drive in preparation for a factory restore. I just don't understand this behavior and it really concerns me that, when a HDD fails in the future, I will have to go through this again.

I'd like to revive this thread since this is the same thing I am going through.

I have a ex495 and the secondary drive failed. The primary drive is fine as I can see all the contents when I stick it into an external enclosure. I've tried all the steps as callmebob and have the same issues.

Has anyone figured out a way to clear the bad drive without doing a factory reset?

Also - I would like to grab files off my primary drive before I do a factory reset (since this seems to be the only option). The problem is that I get errors every time I try to copy a file. I put the primary drive into my external enclosure and navigate to the DATA drive - then I navigate to a folder with data I'd like (e.g. shares/photos) but when I try to copy a file to another drive I get an error that reads "Cannot copy [filename]: The file can not be accessed by the system."

Does anyone know how to access the files? Are they gone since the secondary drive is gone?

TIA!!!

Ah well... I should have dug some more before asking the second question. Found the answer at this thread: viewtopic.php?t=7360 (maybe this should be stickied?)

Still wondering about the first question though.

Id like to sign myself up. My frustration runs so deep with the MediaSmart Server I personally want to find my crowbar and film a good how to smash your mediasmart into pieces the EX490 I have. First I cant extract rar files over the network regardless of the size, then I get a degraded performance, now the blue health led is lighting up no hard drive bay lights are lighting up. So at this point when I remoted into the server it mentioned drive c delayed write failure. Now I can remote into the desktop but cant click on sh*& Cant even login to home server console. So the fun begins of crossing my fingers and moving whatever data I had faith this box would save me from to some other means, and I suppose troubleshoot one drive at a time. Now the blue health led flashing thing can and does go away dependant on how many times I shutdown the server and it comes up normally. Now if Drive C has gone to crap will HP replace the drive since its not even 1 YEAR!!!!!!!! and have others had the same issue where the beloved media smart server becomes Unreliable. Im sorry im just knocking this box and I understand why they discontinued this product.

Questions of the new year are.

1) Does HP warrant a dud drive not even 1 year old?.

2) Is there any way of installing led activity software to see WTF is going on?

3) Can I back up the drives / extract the data that is on the drives currently in the media smart server without using the media smart server anymore?

I'll jump in.
1) Does HP warrant a dud drive not even 1 year old?. [ They should be able to do something, but may be a new/rebuilt sever from what I have read]
2) Is there any way of installing led activity software to see WTF is going on? [ I'm not sure what this is.]
3) Can I back up the drives / extract the data that is on the drives currently in the media smart server without using the media smart server anymore?
[You should be able to attach via a usb dock or attach inside a desktop and see/save the data]

Good luck, got to say, when it's working it's awesome. When it's not
I repeat myself a lot [ I always have 1 drive non pooled with the server folders backed up just in case.]

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