Yesterday evening I had to do a 'forced shut down' of my server as it would not power off on it's own.

This was not the first time I have had to do this...

Today, the server won't start properly!

It powers up, but won't get as far as detecting the drives (no drive lights come on). I did manage to press the Status/Recovery button one time and get two blue & 1 red flash of lights indicating BIOS corrupted.

I have tired many times and only once been able to get this code.

But I don't get the 'blinking red' LEDs that indicate POST or BIOS have failed!

Can anyone suggest potential causes or, preferably, solutions to the problem?

I have not fiddled with the system other than adding 2 hard drives on top of the original Seagate system drive (which I believe there may be problems with certain batches pre-2008 - mine was purchased January 2008).

Having to hard power off your server is usually an indication of a hard drive issue. I suspect your BIOS is fine and that you have a failed hard drive. A search (or reading other topics in the Troubleshooting forum) will show you how to troubleshoot a failed hard drive.

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Alex Kuretz
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Thanks for the prompt response.

I spent about 20 minutes on the phone to HP this morning and they ran through a series of tests and came to the same conclusion - it is most likely a corrupt system drive (the Seagate one from late 2007).

I now need to find a way of connecting the drive to a computer so that I can run the Seatools tests on it...

Without any drives in the server starts up and takes about 25 seconds to settle to the status light alternating between purple and blue. And will stay like that forever (or so it seems).

With either or both of the non-system drives in place, it does exactly the same.

So I've run all the Seatool diagnostic tests that are available - no errors reported anywhere!

Have also run CHKDSK (from Win not from DOS) and no errors reported.

Plugged it back in to WHS and exactly the same problem...

Power supply? I don't think so as with no drives installed it starts up and sits with the light flashing purple/red quite happily and steadily. It also does the same with one or two drives (but not the system drive) in place.

Corrupt OS? Could be - might try a system recovery later as I have not yet had the email HP promised to send me with further information.

Broken NIC? - I've read about this and got this far: "If the server stays running then check your routers DHCP Listing for a device starting with the name MININT followed by other things. The only reason for doing this is to veryify your LAN Port on the server is functional." Can someone explain how to do this as I don't seem to be able to! I can get access to my router, but don't get any computer names and nothing is connected via ethernet ports - only wireless devices...

Anyone any ideas or suggestions?

Please!

So you connected the drives to your PC and ran Seagate tools on all the drives? Have you tried the Windows SMART utility? viewtopic.php?f=6&t=12459

I still suspect a hard drive with issues. Have you tried booting the server with just the system drive installed?

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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?

Thank you for the response.

I ran Seatools on the system drive only - I had no reason to suspect the data drives as, with them removed, exactly the same behaviour occurred.

I spoke to HP again this morning - very helpful. They advised a system recovery from the PC.

Apart from a few hiccups and about 8 hours of watching and waiting I have access to the server again and have set up the user accounts again.

All seems to work, but not sure if I have lost any data yet. I seem to recall seeing some data on the system drive partition when I had it plugged in to a PC. I guess that if there was it will be gone now.

If you had duplication enabled then your data should be intact, or if you did the Server Recovery on the existing system drive then nothing on the data partition is erased, only the OS partition.

_________________
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?

All back up and running with all updates applied now.

WHS Console shows that 'Network Healthy', but all the hard drive lights and the network health light on the actual server are all purple!

Went to the 'Server Storage' page as a result of reading the HP page, but it showed the three drives as 'Healthy'.

Apparently this indicates that the hard drives are not part of the server pool, or a drive has been removed from the pool or a new drive has been added but not integrated yet.

So. I installed Home Server SMART as recommended on this forum (thanks) and it shows that one of my data drives shows "Current Pending Sector Count ... Degraded ... Pending Bad Sectors: 8"

Time to start reading up on something else...