Todd

Well, life for the EX485 seemed to take a turn for the worst. Decided to archive some of the files to an external drive hooked to the server via SATA. All of a sudden the server shut down during transfer. When I restarted it, the storage partition on the OS drive show up as not connected. and I couldn't add it back. All options were grayed out.

I could see the shares, but checking the backups, the only one apparently missing was my daughter's PC. It showed no backups at all. I shut down and pulled the drive. Ran SpinRite on it at level 4 for over a day (1.5TB). It didn't show any errors, but the SMART screen did show a couple red marks. Still nothing when I installed it again. I looked at backing up the backups using BDBB, but it said my external drive wasn't big enough.

I then attempted a OS restore, hoping it would bring back the missing partition on the OS drive. That didn't seem to work very well. I kept getting errors when I attempted the setup. I found some Microsoft documentation that suggested doing an OS restore and not going ahead with installing the connector, but rather remote in and doing updates until they have completed. It indicated the server would attempt to recover but may take a long time without showing much information. I'm hoping that's what's occurring, but wanted any advice someone more knowledgeable about this may have.

When I remote in, the console doesn't function, a popup says the backup isn't running, try rebooting or contact support. When I look at the explorer there are multiple drives showing. I, J, K, and L in addition to C. The server currently has 3 1.5TB drives and a 2TB drive, but drive L shows about 3.5 TB and the others are from about 0.5 to 0.9 TB. in drive L, I see shares and it looks like my files are still there. I'm hope this is a positive sign of restoring the shares. I've left the server running to see if it progresses, but do not see much difference. Does anyone know if it may just be rebuilding, or is this a lost cause.

I had already ordered 2 2TB drives through Newegg (using the Home Server Show link) when they were on sale and they should arrive today. I plan now to use them to copy off anything I can salvage. If a rebuild is a lost cause for the backups, I'll do a factory format and start to restore the files I have.

The good news is I've used CrashPlan on my servers and all my shares are backed up. The bad news is I was never able to fully backup the backups nor do I know if they could be restored correctly (always wanted to test it). Also, with Comcast's bandwidth cap, the more I can salvage, the quicker I can recover.

Although the backup db may be toast I still have my machines running, so I can start again. I'll have lost some old configurations, but as long as the family photos are intact, I can survive.

Any insight on WHS V1 rebuilding is appreciated.

Not the whole time, just needed to make more room on one of the servers and moved some old movies over.

I had the message appear again when I returned from a two week trip. I uninstalled Perfect Disk and haven't seen the error return since. I still have it running on my EX495 and haven't seen the problem reappear there yet.

I've just started experiencing a similar problem. First on my EX485. I got a message about drive 0 failing and ran repair. I also ran SpinRite on it. Everything checked out okay. Sometime later I got another message. At the same time I found my EX495 also reporting drive 0 failing. Seemed too much of a coincidence. I run LightsOut and also have Perfect Disk on the servers. I'm wondering if an operation was occurring when the the servers shut down that caused a disk error.

I had beem moving files between the two servers to balance storage and probably ran Prefect Disk during this time. Not exactly sure of the cause, but it's odd that both servers developed the same error at the same time. It happened again this morning, which prompted me to log in and post.