All of my drive lights are blinking blue - purple - blue - purple. My recent backup failed and when I did a manual backup it said that it finished and then it said that it failed.

I don't know what's going on but it is very scary.

I have one drive attached by USB and another by eSata for a total of 6 drives.

The console says that all drives are healthy and the system is healthy except that my machine is not backed up. When I clicked on "ignore this issue" it still would not go back to healthy.

I am now reinstalling my connector software in hopes that I can do a manual backup and fix this.

I am not using any add-ins for christmas lights and the easter egg is off.


I just install Windows 7 7100 x64 yesterday so this is a clean new install with no backups.

EDIT: After reinstalling the connector the console shows Green/Healthy. But the drive lights are still flashing!

Funny the health indicator in the system tray shows green but if I log into the console it shows the backup error.

Fast or slow blink? I've not heard of this, have you tried a reboot?

_________________
Alex Kuretz
Remote Notification: Monitoring and alerting for your Home Server via email, Twitter, text message, RSS, push notifications, and on your Mac desktop
Have you tried our Add-Ins?

Wow thanks for the quick response. It is a slow blink.... that is no longer there!

Very wierd. I don't know what to say now.

Are you sure that you didnt have the easter egg going...HAHAHA...just kidding

Good to hear that all is good

My EX470 was exhibiting the exact same drive light symptoms over the weekend. The console showed nothing at fault. I rebooted the EX470 and the drive lights went back to solid blue. FYI I have 4 internal drives and one external USB DVD burner.

I'm encountering the same symptoms. All other status lights are blue (normal). Data on the server can be accesses on the network. The WHS console tells me that all is okay but does not that the system is:"Cleaning up the database 5% finished "and has said that for all reconnections for the last hour.

I suggest waiting that ine out -- over night maybe as a minimum? If still at the same place tomorrow go in via Remote Desktop, fire up the Task Manager, go to the processes tab, sort by "CPU" and report back here what is using the most CPU cycles...

_________________
....JBick

EX475, 2 GB, LE-1640
PC1: Vista-->W7 Ultimate/32, (D-Drive RAID-5 Array)
PC2: Lenovo Laptop, Win XP Home SP3
2xLinksys WRT54G v1.1 and 2xNetGear GS105 Gbit switch

The HP MSS EX475 at the office started doing this purple drive lights flashing thing a few days ago. Both drive lights start flashing back and forth between blue and purple about once per second. This goes on for a few minutes then they both go blue for hours then back to flashing purple for a few minutes. This has been going on for several days now. The console shows no status other than green.

Update...

The MSS had been running for 42 days so I rebooted it and the Purple/Blue went away. Still, I wonder what it was.

This happened to me several days ago (I was getting ready for a 3-day weekend conference and didn't have time to troubleshoot). I scrambled to put the files I was in the middle of using (which were open at the time and didn't seem to be affected) on backup media, and I opened the console in case I could tell what was going on, but there were no indications of anything amiss. (I also pretty much immediately checked here to see if it was a known problem and only found two threads that mention it: this one and one from 2008. No idea what caused it in either thread so far.)

I didn't reboot and the next time I had a chance to notice, it had gone away on its own. (I haven't checked the logs yet.) But I had a slightly different symptom as well that might be worth mentioning. I have 2 drives for server storage and a third internal drive that's not part of the pool for server backup. As you know, pool drives show blue and non-pool drives show purple. When I had the blinking lights, the 2 pool drives were the ones switching between blue and purple; the non-pool drive wasn't lit at all. (And they are all back to normal now.)

I wondered at the time if it could be related to drive checks (to see if the drives were healthy). I was working late and this was during the backup period (in my case, 12am - 4am).

Kira

Okay, I still can't find any decent info about this problem. Has anyone here had this problem recur? It's happening to my server right now, and it seems to recur from time to time. I know my server has been rebooted at least once before this current recurrence, since Power Pack 3 apparently installed itself.

Per an earlier suggestion in this thread, I just checked Task Manager and nothing seems to be using CPU. (System Idle fluctuates among the high 90s. Never saw it dip below 95% while I was watching.)

Event Viewer shows no adverse events for today (and the system wasn't blinking when I first sat down to my computer today, so if it is tied to an event, that event should be from today).

Anyone know anything? The system works fine, I haven't seen any problems. It's just that the curiosity is killing me! (And the chance that there may be a problem waiting to happen.)

Kira

If you RDP into the unit and fire up Task Manager, go to the Process tab, check the box to view all processes, what tasks are using all that CPU resource?

_________________
....JBick

EX475, 2 GB, LE-1640
PC1: Vista-->W7 Ultimate/32, (D-Drive RAID-5 Array)
PC2: Lenovo Laptop, Win XP Home SP3
2xLinksys WRT54G v1.1 and 2xNetGear GS105 Gbit switch

Um, as I mentioned, System Idle (I can't remember its exact name without looking again--System Idle Task? System Idle Process?). It's the default task that CPU is attributed to when nothing is using it. So everything on the server was using (collectively) 5% of the CPU at most.

(In re-reading my post, I realize that when I said "System Idle is using 95% of my CPU", it could have looked like I meant "My system at idle is using 95% of my CPU." It would have helped if I could have remembered the rest of the proper name of the task. I always forget if it's System Idle Process or System Idle Task. On Vista, at least, it's System Idle Process--just checked. Anyway, sorry for being unclear. I'm naturally wordy and sometimes try to economize in my descriptions to reduce the length of posts.)

Kira

Sorry, I mis-read your statement (obviously).

_________________
....JBick

EX475, 2 GB, LE-1640
PC1: Vista-->W7 Ultimate/32, (D-Drive RAID-5 Array)
PC2: Lenovo Laptop, Win XP Home SP3
2xLinksys WRT54G v1.1 and 2xNetGear GS105 Gbit switch

No problem. But do you have any other ideas?

Incidentally, it was blinking most of yesterday (every time I looked at it), but today it's back to normal again. It goes away on its own. My previous conjecture was that it might be a sign that the system is doing a hard drive check; is there any way to tell that? I do know how to use Remote Desktop Connection, but I don't use it often because I don't want to break anything that's working. (As an inveterate tweaker on my standard systems, I worry that I will forget what system I'm on and start tweaking the server. And I don't generally know the inner workings of servers.)

Thanks,
Kira

I'm 99% sure this is not an intentional indication of any activity on the server, but rather a bug of some sort due to either high system load or some other issue.

_________________
Alex Kuretz
Remote Notification: Monitoring and alerting for your Home Server via email, Twitter, text message, RSS, push notifications, and on your Mac desktop
Have you tried our Add-Ins?