The SYS drive on the EX470 died on Wednesday morning after only 10 months of service. HP has sent me a replacement drive under warranty and I will be spending this Friday night replacing the drive and doing a Server Recovery. This sucks.
Background
My parents called and said that the “little house” was Red. Are you sure? I should have received the text alert. I should have known before they saw it. WTF? I will just remote in and fix it. Probably some new update or maybe the backup database is flipped up. No biggie.
Where the hell is the server? Crap.
Now what? I am going to get in the truck and head over there. Fortunately I am off this Wednesday so I have a few hours extra. Maybe their router glitched and killed remote access. That might explain the little red house?
Dead SYS Drive
So I am here. Now what? WHS Console does not work. Crap². I see that the Health light is flashing blue. That can’t be good. Power down with the push of a button!
Server powering back up. Lights, camera, act…flashing blue light again. Crap³
Since the HP MSS does not have any way to see what is going on (video monitor) I am dead in the water. I still have a few months left on the warranty so I will give HP a call.
- 1-800-474-6836
- “Tech Support”
- “Its something else”
- “HP MediaSmart Server”
- No, I don’t to be transferred to the business area.
- Hang up.
- 1-800-474-6836
- “Tech Support”
- “Its something else”
- “Media Vault”
- Finally get a person
Ok, so I get Josh at HP. Cool dude. He walks me through a bunch of steps to see if we can figure out what is going on. He tells me that it seems to be the system drive and that I need a new one. He also suggests that if I have a way of checking the drive on a Vista machine before they send a new one out I should try it. Of course I agree but is that standard HP Tech Support? I could just imagine my parents (or the average consumer) trying to check it. I tell him I have an enclosure at home and will try it. By now It is 2:00 PST Wednesday and he is off work at 3:30 PST. He says he will call me before the end of his shift to verify the disk status. I head home.
No call.
It is now 6:00 PST Wednesday and I am really cranky. In addition to this failed drive I am also fighting with the TZO service for the Reno camera, uploading my previous weeks late article, having problems remotely configuring the WHS ports for the Reno server and MY stupid irrigation module on MY WHS apparently forgot who it was for a week because the sprinklers had not been going on and what little grass I had during this drought was almost totally dead! Breath. All three servers are now being wankers. Why me?
I crack open my first beverage and call HP.
- 1-800-474-6836
- “Tech Support”
- “Its something else”
- “Media Vault”
- Finally get a person
Ok, so now I got Carl on the phone. hey Carl, this is Tim and my case number is 090909somethingsomethingyadayada
Carl is cool too. Carl says he will send a new drive out tomorrow and it will be here Friday. Just in time for this article. Great. Oh you need my credit card to hold $125 until I send the old one back? Um ok.
I will wait till Friday.
Equipment Needed:
- New Hard Drive
- Original HP Installation Disks
- Patience
- Four Beers (optional as always)
I am really not looking forward to this. Lets set this pig on fire. Ugh.
Drive Installation
I get a call that the drive has just arrived on location so I grab the wife and head to the truck. As I get to the truck I decide I should probably bring her along so I go back inside and grab her again and we leave. Fortunately for me she likes the grabbing.
Here is the original drive. RIP ST3500620AS. RIP my friend.
Here is the drive from HP. They have a hold on my credit card until I return the bad disk.
No screws. I usually lose the screws. I am sure that is not news to yous. Hey why don’t I just go eat some hay, make things out of clay, and lay by the bay?
The new drive is ready to go home. Just like me actually.
Finger and thumb pushing the new drive back to its home. Why you don’t you just go to your home? That is your home! Are you too good for your home?
Server Recovery
Now that the drive has been replaced I am ready to restart the system.
I start the system and press the Server/Recovery button with a paperclip once when the health indicator flashes blue and red. I had done this plenty of times yesterday so it I was ready for it. I put the Server Recovery CD in the hardwired laptop and it starts up automatically.
Of course I accept.
Next…
This is where it could not find the drive when the SYS hard drive was dead.
Server found. Nice. I am happier now.
Josh said Server Recovery the other day. Who am I to argue?
Ok, erase away. Well, it is a new drive so install away!
This part really did take 60 minutes!
Click on next!
We are finished? Sweet.
I clicked on Finish and am waiting.
Ok, I am still in the same application so NEXT!
I agreed already, just make fixie.
New connector? I had problems last week. Uh oh.
Going ok…
Looks the same…
Did I miss something here?
Guess the Server Recovery is a little different.
Two check marks are good.
Naming it the same as before.
Same password as before.
Ok, I agree.
Ok, I agree again.
Just make fixie.
Updates always scare me…
Here we go…
34%. 34%. 34%. Flippers. Now here is the crappy part. It has been sitting at 34% for over an hour. It says not to turn off your home server during the process but it says nothing about clicking on the red X and going home.
See you later my friend. I have dinner plans tonight.
So it is now really Friday night. After dinner we decided (uh, I begged) to stop by and check on the server.
I start the WHS Connector over again and get the right screen.
I now go through the set up process again and start entering data.
I had the Add-Ins all ready from last weeks installation.
Mental note: Since you cannot backup the SYS drive you may want to keep screen shots of your settings such as Remote Notification and Disk Management Add-Ins. It went fast since I had the data right there.
I add the Users and complete what I can. The data is also there. I am happier but I still have some serious issues.
As for the other two WHS I got the sprinklers working and the camera connected via TZO (it was always working with mControl btw) and all the ports and remote notifications are working. The LX 195 has been working fine since we had to reconfigure the remote access after the last major WHS update!
Mental note: Many times you can fix the remote access by just turning it off and then turning it back on. This works UNLESS you are ONLY accessing via remote in which case you can get disconnected!
Problems
I am going to do this article a littler different this week and stop here. I really need to fix some issues before I finish the Recovery. My issues are:
- Router is not available for remote access (HTTPS) but you can access PhotoShare via HTTP. I assume this is a router issue (Uverse ATT no UPnP) but my router settings never changed.
- The connector on the main laptop gets weird sometimes. I assume this is a Power Pack issue like I had last week.
- The connectors no longer work on the other two laptops. I assume I will have to reinstall them? I also cannot access port 55000 from the subnet to start a clean connector install.
- The backup database said it needed repair but I had not done any backups since the Recovery.
Solutions
I am going to start working on fixing this during the week. Since I have no Remote Access I must do this at my parents after work each night until it is fixed. Feel free to post any comments or ideas since it will take me a few days to get back on location.
This sucks but Viva WHS anyway.
See you next Friday night,
Timothy Daleo
Your parents called? Are you backing up their computer from 'another' location? How do you set this up?
Is it really not possible to backup the SYS drive? This seems very poor. What if I install something like Acronis Trueimage on the WHS machine itself, surely logged in by virtual desktop I'll be able to backup the SYS drive?
I bought my WHS thinking it ran a proper RAID system. Had I realised it was just Windows duplicating only the data I might not have bought it.
I have four WHS. One at home and three at other locations. When I get an error the Remote Notifcation sends it to my cell phone. I fix warnings all the time without anyone ever really noticing via remote. No biggie.
Since the WHS SYS drive died (at my parents) it was not sending out a notification. The Red House came up on their internal network and I had no idea it was offline.
When I get the notifcations I usually can fix them remotely and they never see the "Red House".
Tim,
I am going through the process, it is exactly like yours so far. The HDD hp sent me is the exact model that was giving me problems. Did you encounter this too? Is your new HDD still working properly?
My replacement drive is working great. Sometimes drives are just bad. The drive is spinning 10,368,000 times a day so crap happens.
Make sure you decide if you are going to leave Updates off during the Restore process.
Tim
Thanks, I am nervously holding my breath. I had to deal with the Avast fiasco now I am dealing with this. I love WHS
how do I designate the ip address to be the same as before? My server is rebooting right now and getting ready to go through the next process
A quick link is:
http://www.homeserverland.com/wiki/w/whs/assign-s…
Tim
this is painfully slow process. I hope it fixes all my problems.
You are in good company. One of my Vista machines got a compbatt error after an Auto Update this morning and I am having to restore back up to last nights backup. Two hours for me so far…
Tim
you lied you said this is a 4 beer project. I am on my 5th guinness and hope to finish this before I pass out.
Mine were 22 ounce. Four by 3:15? Not too bad of a Saturday. I love WHS.
when I get done with this project I would really like for you to teach me how to set notifications to my cell phone. I could not get that program to work. I read your post but it did not help me. It has me stumped.
You probably have a port issue with the email forwarding. We can work through it next week.
thank you. I have successfully installed the new sys drive. Now I have to delete and reformat the old sys drive. I am going to use an empty bay drive as you have suggested. Thank you very much for all your help.
Glad it went well. And long…six beers?
Don't forget your Add-Ins and the Remote Notification!
Tim
Please help me out-
Thx to a greate seat.
My problem is that im not can`t get WHS Connector out off my system in the laptop.
It don`t want to delet.???? Someone that have the same problem?
use W7. hade to reinnstall, but don`t was abel to get ride of the connector.
So now when im try to get a new innstall, the softwar innstall disk don`tlet me pass, sinc my old connector still are on the computer. I have 5 computers thats are connectet to WHS all was off when i was trying to reinnstall—Please help..
Terje,
Put up a post in the forum and leave the link here so we can try and help.
Do you know if the Server Restore process is available on on non-HP windows home server. I have it running on a white-box server. I have no paper-clip hole for this situation: SYS hard drive fail!
You can perform a Windows Home Server reinstallation using the Server Restore DVD. This will keep all existing files and the storage pool intact. Simply insert the DVD into a home computer that is attached via Ethernet cable to the router.
Thanks so much Timothy. So these steps sound correct?
1. replace SYS drive in Home Server
2. run restore DVD from another computer on my home network?
I am confused about how the restore process finds my home server, the home server will not boot because the SYS drive is dead. So if I put a new hard drive in, and power up the server…won't it just be stuck there with no network?
This is the part from your post that I don't know if I can do from my server:
"I start the system and press the Server/Recovery button with a paperclip once when the health indicator flashes blue and red. I had done this plenty of times yesterday so it I was ready for it. I put the Server Recovery CD in the hardwired laptop and it starts up automatically."
If your server is a true white box then you should just be able to connect a monitor and keyboard and do the installation directly on the machine. The need for connector installations is due to factory WHS systems not having KVM. Since you said white box then you should just be able to replace the drive and reinstall the WHS software on the new drive.
Is it really not possible to backup the SYS drive? This seems very poor. What if I install something like Acronis Trueimage on the WHS machine itself, surely logged in by virtual desktop I
Correct. With WHS v1, you cannot backup the SYS drive. Although you could theoretically backup the C: drive with image software, the restore would only work until the next balance, file transfer or change to the WHS, which makes that image worthless.
Now, remember that a System Restore only takes 30 minutes or so and the data is saved so a disk loss is covered when using file duplication. The only data you lose are the settings for WHS.
With Vail, the SYS drive has a backup feature and keeps track of all changes. Once the new beta version of Vail is available, you will be able to see the new backup features. It does timed backups of the whole system!
WHS has never used RAID, nor advertised that fact. What WHS do you have?
I have a RipNAS (www.ripnas.com), which runs Windows Home Server 2003. I just assumed that when they said there were two copies of the data it was using RAID, or a least true disc mirroring (in software). I expected WHS to keep running if either disc failed, so I could just put a replacement disc in and it would then replicate everything again. I was astonished to discover it doesn't work this way (I'm a Software Engineer by profession so I'm used to replicated servers at work).
So why if I take a backup of the SYS drive is it worthless? Surely if the SYS drive failed I could put in a new one and restore from backup and that would give me exactly what I'd lost and I'd be able to carry on from there? This works with my laptop so why wouldn't it with the WHS SYS drive?
I know the restore doesn't take long. What gives me nightmares is getting everything set up the same way. It's bizarre, I now have a server at home and yet the only thing that isn't backed up properly is my server!
The sys drive is just made to be recovered or resest if it goes bad. The user "data would be duplicated on another drive (assume folder duplication) and the recovery would use the data on the sys drive. A factory reset would be needed if the drive actually was totally lost or damaged beyond use.
Take a few minutes and read each of these good posts/papers:
http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/en/details.asp…
http%3a//download.microsoft.com/download/2/f/c/2fc09c20-587f-4f16-aa33-c6c4c75fb3dd/Windows%2520Home%2520Server%2520Technical%2520Brief%2520-%2520Drive%2520Extender.docx
This is an excellent document (the two links are the same), thankyou. However, I can see nothing in here that indicates a direct locally taken backup of the SYS partition will be useless when restored. It does explain why a direct backup of the primary or any other data partitions would be no good, because all the tombstone files would be potentially inconsistent. But these are all held on the primary data partition, not the SYS partition so no such issue would occur backing up SYS. Note I'm talking about backing up the 20GB SYS partition which is mounted as C:, not the entire of the primary physical hard drive which also contains the primary data partition mounted as D:.
My RipNAS server is not just a Windows Home Server, it has various other software installed (Squeezebox Server, dbpoweramp batch ripper, Asset UPnP DLNA server etc.) so re-installing it from scratch is going to be a lot more work than a restore of a vanilla WHS. Hence why I want to backup SYS.
By the way the tip in the document to use //localhost/shares/… is very useful, I find using //ripnas/shares/… a pain locally on the WHS because all accesses fail if my DSL router is down (which contains the DNS and DHCP servers so knows where //ripnas is).
When I come across documentation that will further explain why the backup of a WHS System does not work I will post it here.
If I tried to do a server recovery on the current sys drive, does it erase just data from the primary partition or does it erase data from both partitions (sys and data)?
A server recovery will only reset the system data and will not affect your files. You will need to recreate all of the users, settings, etc. but the data folders will be intact.