I had problem where my EX487 would not boot up and I couldn't connect to it on my MacPro. I have all my drive bays full on the server and also have 8TB of external drives in a 4 bay USB enclosure (i.e., all bays are full). Following the advice on these forums, I begin taking out the storage pool drives one by one in my server, connecting them via USB to a windows machine I have and running CheckDisk repair on them. Long story, short, I found that one of the 2TB storage pool drives that I had in my server was bad. When I took that drive out, my server booted up once again and I could connect to it with all the other drives in place. Unfortunately, I couldn't repair the bad drive using chkdsk because chkdsk said that there wasn't enough room on the bad drive to do the repairs. I thus need to replace this bad drive, but have some questions about the best way to do this. I have duplication on, but it looks like I don't have any extra space in my storage pool with the extra drive missing (my system status shows -1.0 bytes of free space on the server with this drive missing).

It's my understanding that to replace a failing drive you normally want to keep it in the drive bay and then remove it using the Console before you add the replacement drive. Unfortunately, if I put the bad drive back in, my server won't boot and I can't connect to it using the Console to remove it. I do have two new 2 TB SATA drives and I could connect one of them externally through a USB cable I have to connect SATA drives and temporarily add it to the storage pool so that I have enough storage for full duplication. So my question is what is the best way to replace this dead drive and maximize my chances of preventing any loss of data on that drive? I'm not really worried about any backup information on the failed drive (I have my other machines backed up other ways), I'm only worried about losing data from my server that might be on that drive. Thanks.

Just install another drive same size or larger to your storage pool. You can install it internal or external does not matter so long as WHS can see it and work with it. After the new drive is added you can then have WHS Remove the missing drive the one that failed. WHS will then rebuid the storage pool.

The only data you will lose is any client data and any unduplicated data that was stored on the drive which DE may not have gotten around to duplicating. Since some client data may have been lost WHS may also request that you rebuild the Client Backup Database.

In the 3 yrs I have been running WHS v1 I have only had to remove only 1 missing drive but it really only takes one bad drive to cause WHS to pinch a fit. While WHS does try to keep an eye on drive health the only really good way to do this is using a program which can actually read the S.M.A.R.T Information for the drive itself. This will allow you to determine the best time to remove a drive before it becomes a problem. Having said that I can also tell you that all drives will die at some point in time, many will give you advanced warning others can be perfectly fine one minute and not the next.

There is an add in called Home Server Smart that will read the S.M.A.R.T. Information on your drives to provide you with a snap shot of the actual drives health. Below is a link where you can read about this add-in and download it if its of interest to you.

http://www.dojonorthsoftware.net/Freebi ... TBeta.aspx

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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

I think I've got something similar and just want to verify the correct steps to remedy the situation...

Drive 4 (top drive) in my HP MediaSmart EX485 shows as missing and I cannot get it to initialize. To properly remedy this situation and not lose data, I remove the missing/failed drive, install a new drive, let Windows Home Server do its thing to restore the data, and then remove the missing/failed drive?

The failed drive is a Seagate ST31500341AS, as are all the drive in my HP MediaSmart EX485. Is there another brand/model I should use?

Thank you,
Dave

Chosing another hard drive is a million dollar question in that everyone has various prefrences and comfort levels. As time passes more and more hard drives being manufactured are Advanced Format. You need to know this because they are not all plug in play as was the case before with WHS v1. Some require you to run an Align Utility, others for single partition use require you to jumper then and some can be used straight out of the box. Advanced format drives use larger 4K vs 512B sector sizes and so for the older Operating Systems aka Legacy OS they need to be prepaired a certain way adding an additional step to the installation process. This is very important information to be aware of. Now not all hard drives area Advanced Format or AF but many are.

Seagate has AF drives which you can just install and they will run without your having to do anything special. While I do not use Seagate Drives in my servers others do and continue to have good things to say about them. As with any hard drive you will find people who have good and bad things to say about certain hard drive manufactures. I always tell people to chose drives from a manufacturer they are most comfortable with. For me the drives I continue to use are Western Digital, Hitachi and I do have a couple Samsung but I would never say to you use this drive or that drive but would venture to just say I am having good luck with these types of drives.

By nature Hard Drives are mechanical devices that one day will fail. Some have a higher failure rate than others and some of the better manufactured drives do fail within a short time frame. While I continue to enjoy using my Western Digital Black Drives I did have one recently which did fail and I was able to get it replaced but I did not have it in my server for very long before the failure but for the most part my other WD Black Drives run very well.

I just wanted to first mention AF drives and to make you aware of how all drives will fail at some point in time. This makes having backups important and if all your data exists only on the server then your data is not truely backed up because a true backup means your data exists in multiple locations. So with having a drive fail on you it may be a good time to reflect on the backup question as well which is discussed in great detail in the forums.

With all that stuff to keep in mind. You should be able to add another drive and remove the now missing drive from the storage pool. If there is enough room on your existing storage pool drives to store the data you could remove the drive but installing another drive first would make very good sense for the distribution or balancing of your data accross the drive pool. You will lose data that was not duplicated or if it was set for duplication and WHS did not get around to duplicating it all because DE is not the fastest solution for duplication then you will lose that data. If your failed drive also contained client data then that data would be lost but do not attempt a repair on the backup database until the failed drive is properly removed because WHS will alway report an issue with the client backup database when a drive is missing. This may or may not be the case.

So add the new drive and remove the old and after that if you still get a client backup database error then and only then have WHS repair it.

If you have additional questions please feel free to ask them. If you want specific hard drive recommendations, meaning make and model number there are many posts throughout the forums on various hard drives current forum members are using and their experiences with them. If I were to recommend a hard drive it would be the WD Black which tend to be more expensive then other drives and then my next drive would be the Hitachi DeskStar both drives are 7200 RPM drives but many with HP MSS seem to prefer the Green Drives which tend to run a 5400 or 5900 RPM also your server uses SATA II drives but you can use SATA III drives which are backwards compatable with SATA II.

Good Luck with your task at hand.

_________________
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

Thank you for the help. I ordered four Western Digital WD20EURS hard drives from Amazon.com this morning to replace the Seagate drives in my HP MediaSmart EX485. I tried to run Seagate SeaTools on the failed drive by installing it in another computer but the drive would not initialize. I also installed the Home Server SMART plug-in and it shows bad sectors on two of the three remaining hard drives in my HP MediaSmart EX485. All four Seagate drives were installed brand-new just last April.

Thank you,
Dave

I would contact Seagate to discuss sending the drives back for replacement. I would not try using their website because it will insist on your providing info from their Seatools utility which your not going to get for the drive that will not initialize.

_________________
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

The Western Digital WD20EURS hard drives arrived Friday and I installed one in drive bay 4 (top) of my HP MediaSmart EX485. Windows Home Server recognized it and I added it to the storage pool. However, when I attemt to remove the failed Seagate ST31500341AS drive, I receive a warning stating "You will permanently lose the files on this missing hard drive if you continue. Continue only if you no longer need to access these files. To keep the files that are on this hard drive, connect it to your home server, and then click Retry." I thought Folder Duplication was supposed to prevent this? I cannot connect the failed drive because, well, it failed. Do I just click Next at this screen? I'm confused.

Thank you,
Dave

Hi just wondered if you ever managed to sort out your problem with the disk 4.

I've just returned from holiday and powered up my mediasmart and the forth disk is showing missing.

can I simply add an external to allow me to eventually remove this missing drive or have I already lost all the data despite duplication being enabled ?

Thanks

I had a similar issue that cannot be resolved using the above, and hope to get some help.

My failing drive would not be allowed to be removed from the server storage pool. I had plenty of storage so it could be removed with space left for files on storage.
It gave me errors about some files and even when I selected the option to just remove it, it still won't let me remove it.

So I bought a new 2TB drive, powered down the server, pulled the problem drive out and replaced it with the new one, then powered on the server.

When I booted into the console, WHS is still looking for the problem drive and it shows in the storage tab, although it says 'Missing' next to it. I tried to remove it and it tell me that I cannot because of "file conflicts prevented the hard drive removal", nothing more than that. I added me new drive to the storage pool successfully (however it is stuck at "calculating storage), but of course my server is having a spaz attack and wants to know where the problem drive is. And it's now been over 15 hours and the server is still saying "calculating storage".

Can anyone help me? Can I fix this through an RDP session? How can I remove a drive that physically isn't even in the server, but is still showing as if it's there in the console, and the console software keeps chucking a fart attack when I try to remove it?
Hoping there is a solution.

Please help.

Thanks.

Globespy, have you seen this? Is it possible that you reused a WHS drive?
viewtopic.php?f=5&t=12

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Alex Kuretz
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