12 replies to this topic

[dominodecree]

Hello everyone, this is my first post to The Home Server Show Forms but I have been reading & listing to the podcast (when it was only just Dave) for a long time. If I have broken any rules, I am sorry. I have a very daunting problem.

Thursday I received a critical message from my HP EX495 stating I have a missing USB Drive. I have been searching with little help to find a solution. How can I first find the missing drive then reattach the missing drive? All 4 USB drives are pool drives & when I checked they were all plugged in. I have added 4 screen shots; I hope they have come thr. If not they can be seen http://www.flickr.co...s/dominodecree/ Thanks for any help,
http://www.flickr.co.../in/photostream

http://www.flickr.co...in/photostream/

http://www.flickr.co...in/photostream/

http://www.flickr.co...in/photostream/

[jmwills]

The photos were taking a long time to come up for me, but with external USB drives, you have multiple points of failures. The physical connector on the board, the drive, and the cable. Now you can also have a bad drive.

I would power down everything, server and drives; then swap around the cabling to insure you have solid connections to the board and then power up the drives and then the server. if the drives are still missing, go into the Computer management applet and rescan to see if the drives now appear.

Have you had any recent power outages with the gear?

[dominodecree]

@ jmwills, Sorry about the photos. I have never used Flickr before, I do have a Twitpic account I posted below. No on the power outages, we have been lucky on that lately. The “Computer management applet” is that the Home Server Console? Or do I need to Remote Desktop in to the server. Very sorry about all of this, I’m server stupid. This is why I got the HP MSS, I thought it would be easy to use. Will try the cable switching next. It would have been nice if HP/MS would have named the USB drives by the port used, Top, Middle, Bottom or Front. Again thanks for the help
http://twitpic.com/794rxs/full http://twitpic.com/794snk/full http://twitpic.com/794t61/full http://twitpic.com/794tod/full Hope this loades faster.

[jmwills]

No problem. You can reach the applet via the Control Panel>Administrative Tools

RDP will work just fine. If you have any kind of SMART utility/add-in running for the drives, you will be able to see the serial number of the drives. A good TTP (tips, tricks, & procedures) is to label the drives, be they internal or external, either via the cable or directly on the drives.

[diehard]

Your image http://twitpic.com/794t61/full would indicate that the drive is missing because it's unpluged, however I notice a drive at the top which is a Seagate freeAgent that is not added to the pool.
Is this the same drive ?

Looks like something got messed up, because if the drive indicated at the top is the missing drive, then it's both missing and there.

Check the external 2TB drive that is not added by connecting it to a PC to see if there is anything on it, because if you add it to the pool, it will format that drive. So try to move that data off to your PC temporarily. (Software & UFC DVD's )

You could use the Storage Server Tab to remove the drive. Looks like a bunch of your shares are duplicated. Your Software & UFC DVD's are not duplicated and must be on the missing drive. You would loose those folders data. Then you would add the drive listed at the top as a FreeAgent 2TB into the pool and then the DVD's & TV DVD's would automatically start to duplicate the missing data or the next few hours.

Then add back the missing data from your PC that you put their temporarily.

[dominodecree]

Thanks jmwills for all the help, I will be installing the SMART add-in for V1 tomorrow & label everything.
John yes the missing drive is the one that showed up @ the top to be added. This is what was messing me up so bad. I have a missing drive but when I rebooted the server I got the add the usb hard drive screen.

I will try that Wednesday afternoon. Thanks again everyone, will let you know how things turn out. I just don’t want to re-rip everything.

[dominodecree]

Hello jmwills & John, I was able to find the USB drive that was missing. I have that drive hooked up to a W7 laptop but can’t see it. When I go to device manager, I see it in the drive folder. Is there any voodoo too get it to show up so I can retrieve my data. If I am able to do the cut & paste on the USB drive to save my data how do I add it back. Is it just as simple as cut & paste it back to the server & will it automatically reattach to the folder it belongs to? Again sorry for the silly questions.

[ikon]

In Device Manager, is there an option to import that drive?

[jmwills]

or "Assign a Drive Letter" to the drive. However, with a desktop OS, the drive should be imported/discovered and added automatically.

[dominodecree]

Hooked the USB drive to my media center pc, 64 bit W7. The drive was discovered instantly. Was nice seeing it. Then went to the Home Server Console & removed the bad drive. Took about 3 hours. Added the files back in small chunks using TeraCopy. I’m 85% done & am HAPPY to say everything looks to be working, as it should be. I have spot checked about 5 Movies, TV shows, TV DVD’s, UFC DVD’s & Movie DVD’s. Will keep spot checking for a few more days,and I plan on getting a eSATA box for a second line of defense. Any preferences, I will be adding it to my Media Center PC, it Is have a HP Pavilion Elite 390t HPE with 12G of DDR3 ram, Core-i7-980X with Radeon HD5570 (2 GB) & it has 2 eSATA ports. Thanks again everyone for your help.

ikon, there was no choice to import. Not sure why it showed up on the MC pc but not on the laptop. maybe because the laptop is 32bit????

[diehard]

Thanks for the update, we're glad to see your getting your data back.

As for a eSATA box, the EX495 supports a box with 5 drives so if you want to max that out, go for a 5 bay enclosure. pcdoc has a review here http://homeserversho...li-ex-503b.html

Also MediaSmartServer.net just did a review on this one. http://www.mediasmar...rage-enclosure/

Here is a cheaper model that's recommended at MediaSmartServer.net http://www.newegg.co...D=1p15117zpayi0

[JediTim]

That must be a relief to see you were able to recover your data. I probably wouldn't have slept if I thought I lost my data.

[ikon]

Totally agree about the EX-503. I've got 2 of them and they're great. I would, however, recommend using USB3 rather than eSATA. I am using eSATA to back up my data files from my WHS1 to an external box JBOD box. But, on my new not-yet-in-production WHS2011 box I'm using USB3. I will be happy to leave eSATA behind. It works, but it's finicky, like a child with a bad temper.