So got the replacement card and same problem next I need to start looking at a bad hard drive causing the issue. Either way I am hosed, even if I find the bad hard drive I assume there is no way to do a server restore with all my data intact?

_________________
Cheers,
Damian

DIY WHS - 12.5TB and growing, too many gadgets to list

Did you read the MediaSmartServer blog today?
Blog - http://www.adigitalhomeblog.com
"Like a midget at a urinal, stay on your toes!" - Lieutenant Frank Drebin

I'm having a similar problem with Andromeda. After the last round of Windows updates, I lost all access to all of my shares. I cannot remote access Andromeda at all. I can launch the console directly, but cannot access the shares. WHS boots up fine and all drives spin up. I'm not getting any drive errors, network errors or any errors at all. I first noticed the problem when my nightly backups stopped working correctly. The backup of my main pc would freeze at 17%. Unfortunately, I've not had much time to diagnose the problem and have had Andromeda turned off for the last couple of weeks. I think something got corrupted in the OS, but I"m not even going to try a sever reinstall.

I think I have the issue isolated to a bad drive, just not sue which one. I can load the driver for my SAT2-MV8 (8 drives attached) without issue, it is only when I try to load the driver for the SASLP that WHS craps out. I decided to leave one of the breakaway cables for the SASLP unplugged and when I did this the driver loaded fine. I then did the opposite for the other breakaway cable, and this is when WHS would crash. So it appears that one of the drives that is connected to this second breakaway cable is the bad one. Now trying to find the bad guy and figure out where to go from here.

_________________
Cheers,
Damian

DIY WHS - 12.5TB and growing, too many gadgets to list

Did you read the MediaSmartServer blog today?
Blog - http://www.adigitalhomeblog.com
"Like a midget at a urinal, stay on your toes!" - Lieutenant Frank Drebin

I had drives dropping out a few weeks ago and read about new drivers, but couldn't find them. I had to contact Supermicro support, they are not loaded on their FTP site. The updated drivers fixed my issue. 4.0.0.1200 is the version.

As you know each cable supports 4 drives so if there are 4 drives pull 3 and boot the server if all works well connect another and repeat until the server hangs. If you can isolate the bad drive you can then simply remove it from the storage pool and WHS will rebuild the drive pool. I had this happen to me but not with an MV8 but another card in another server. For me it worked out quite well but I lost some of my client data which was no big deal.

As for the drivers. It may not hurt to try to install them. I will take a look at them myself and hopefully they will have 64bit drivers. Its always been my understanding the MV8's were fine cards and I was opting for LSI Cards but decided to save some funds and the MV8's were like $50 cheaper.

In my case the MV8 card I RMA'd was definately the problem and since I swapped out the card I have not had any issues and the replacement card will arrive this week.

_________________
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

Yeah, that is what I did. On the SASLP card when I had one of the breakaway cables (i.e 4 drives) connected to the card loading the driver would freeze up the system. Through trial and error I was able to find that if I left one of the 4 drives out then the driver would load, so I am thinking that this drive is the bad one. So I did this, was able to load the drivers, but then WHS freezes when I hit next. So one step forward one step back!!! I will have to do some more testing tonight.

_________________
Cheers,
Damian

DIY WHS - 12.5TB and growing, too many gadgets to list

Did you read the MediaSmartServer blog today?
Blog - http://www.adigitalhomeblog.com
"Like a midget at a urinal, stay on your toes!" - Lieutenant Frank Drebin

Well, looks like I have narrowed it down to 4 drives that are connected to the same breakaway cable on my SASLP. So after talking with Alex the thought is that possibly two of the drives either went bad or are failing, at the same time. Since I already had wiped my O/S drive (thinking the original issue was an O/S corruption I wiped it to do a server restore), doing a server restore is no longer an option (I would assume the possibility of trying to do a server restore with two drives missing could do more harm then good).

So my plan of attack, do a clean install of WHS with no drives attached. I just ordered two 2TB drives which hopefully will arrive tomorrow. Once they arrive I will add them to the pool, and then start the fun process of manually copying/moving around data from all the other drives.

I am tempted to just start over and build either a W7 server or WHS 2011, but there are too any features I prefer with WHS v1 (Duplication, JBOD, Data pooling, etc...) that it just doesn't make sense in my book yet.

_________________
Cheers,
Damian

DIY WHS - 12.5TB and growing, too many gadgets to list

Did you read the MediaSmartServer blog today?
Blog - http://www.adigitalhomeblog.com
"Like a midget at a urinal, stay on your toes!" - Lieutenant Frank Drebin

Do the 2 drives cause any issues with any of your other computers when connected to them? I was curious if the drives may be somewhat functional if they were say connected to the SATA ports of your mother board provided yuo had 2 available to you. WHS doesn't care where they are its just needs to see them. Even a USB connection may be more helpful unless the drives are totally toast.

_________________
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

Well, I havent sorted out yet what 2 drives are causing the issue. I have it narrowed down to the 4 drives that are connected to one off the breakaway cables. I will run those through my PC to see if they are hosed or not.

OK, so I did a clean install of WHS with no drives attached, everything is up and running. Question, how can I lock in an IP address on my server. Previously I was using 192.168.0.126. My the clean install the IP Address is now 192.168.0.148. I want to get it back to 192.168.0.126 since that is what many of my settings (such as port forwarding) is already set to. FYI, these are not my real IP addresses, but you get the point

_________________
Cheers,
Damian

DIY WHS - 12.5TB and growing, too many gadgets to list

Did you read the MediaSmartServer blog today?
Blog - http://www.adigitalhomeblog.com
"Like a midget at a urinal, stay on your toes!" - Lieutenant Frank Drebin

Damian,

To set a fixed IP for your WHS, go to Local Area Connection -> properties -> Internet Protocol (TCP/IP) -> Properties -> General and check "use the following IP address." You'll also have to put in the DNS server address.

Depending on your router, you can assign a specific IP to each device in the router setup so the router assigns that specific IP to the WHS instead of it being assigned dynamically.

Its interesting you point to the latest rounds of updates but I believe some of the updates from the earlier part of the year may have caused some issues with my primary server. The issue I encountered was drives just dropping out first with the WD Green Drives so I replaced them and then entire PM enclosures. I changed out eSATA cables, enclosures, and control cards. It actually drove me crazy to the point that I actually performed a NEW SERVER INSTALLATION just to start the entire server over. I installed all the updates and when I went to transfer my data back it became a nightmare with drives dropping out. I believe the issues started back in March or April and prior to that no major issues.

During the new server installation I chose to only install the drivers, MS updates and then copy my data to the server. This ruled out any ADD-INs or additional software as a potential cause of the issue. While my server is currently running the only time I now see drop outs is during heavy transfer loads but its not as bad as it was so now I am scratching my head and am abundantly curious as to what the cause of the problem might be. It may or may not be similar to the issues discussed here but I am curious if the MS updates may have touched upon something sensitive to my servers hardware and so now I have to figure out if its driver, update or combination of both or quite possibly I may have missed something along the way. Regardless of where the issue is I need to address it so any information the you two may have to offer will be helpful and I will also share with you what I find.

What we all do have in common is the use of MV8's while your running them in WHS v1 and I in WHS2011 I do have some concerns about those after having one fail in less than 2 weeks of operation. The backplane in my Norco 2420 although functional was not an issue I only RMA'd that because one of the LED's was not functional. I beleive Andrometa is utilizing an older style backplane as Norco revised the enclosures with new backplanes and fan boards but everything here is relevant.

_________________
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

Funny enough turns out my router did assign the same IP address to my WHS that I was using previously. However, me being a dumba$$ I got my IP addresses mixed up and manually set my WHS IP address to the IP address of my PC, therefore losing my remote access to my WHS!!! When the wife wakes up gonna put her on tech support duty to fix this.

Lesson, don't mess with settings at 4am....

_________________
Cheers,
Damian

DIY WHS - 12.5TB and growing, too many gadgets to list

Did you read the MediaSmartServer blog today?
Blog - http://www.adigitalhomeblog.com
"Like a midget at a urinal, stay on your toes!" - Lieutenant Frank Drebin

So two new 2TB drives came in yesterday. Right now I am in the process of moving data around. Aside from my O/S drive I have 3 drives in Shawshank, the 2 2TB drives (added to the pool) and the 3rd drive being one of the drives with data on it from the pre crash. This drive I added to WHS, just not to the pool and I am copying all the data off of it to the pooled drives. Once done I will then have the drive added to the pool, and start on the next drive with data. There are 15 drives in total I have to do this for. I haven't decided yet if I am just going to copy over everything (and simply let the duplicated data just write over itself) or try to just copy over the single files.

_________________
Cheers,
Damian

DIY WHS - 12.5TB and growing, too many gadgets to list

Did you read the MediaSmartServer blog today?
Blog - http://www.adigitalhomeblog.com
"Like a midget at a urinal, stay on your toes!" - Lieutenant Frank Drebin

If you copy everything over, won't you end up with 4 copies of each file; the original and duplicate, plus new duplicates of each?

I don't have duplication turned on yet, I won't turn it back on until after I am done. I do have duplicates of each file on my drives pre crash, but when I copy one of these files over and go to copy the second duplicated version over it will simply overwrite the first version. Basically none of the original drives are part of the pool, so I am just copying the data off each drive, and once done I format the drive and add it back to the pool

_________________
Cheers,
Damian

DIY WHS - 12.5TB and growing, too many gadgets to list

Did you read the MediaSmartServer blog today?
Blog - http://www.adigitalhomeblog.com
"Like a midget at a urinal, stay on your toes!" - Lieutenant Frank Drebin