Saving a dead WHS assistance

[medwynd]

Having a problem recently with my EX495 where the box keeps shutting down. It has been running fine for a year now.

When it shuts down, all the hard drive lights turn off and the server health light blinks blue.

I have to hold down the restart button to restart it each time and it will stay up for a short while then go down again. It also takes a very long time to reboot. Around 5 minutes or so.

I have one drive bay free and an empty 2TB drive to migrate data off of drive extender so I could do a fresh reinstall if I need to. I would at least like to get it in a stable enough state to be able to migrate the data off of it.

I did see the health light blink red once while I was staring at it and trying to listen to the drives.

Well after monitoring it some more it seems it will not boot up at all now and just keeps going through a reboot cycle over and over.

Attached is the first error I got when I remoted in. The second is the error that shutdown the box while I was logged in via remote as admin.

Any idea on how I should progress from here? I do not know if there is a hardware problem, i.e. the system drive is dieing/dead or if the OS got corrupted somehow.

Can I just pull the drives from the WHS and move the data off to some of my other storage a disk at a time to rebuild the system?

If I pull a drive from the system can I simply connect it to another system to access the files stored on it?

Should I attempt to do a system recovery on it? If I do a system recovery on it, could it potentially ruin data that might be available on the drives right now? Should I pull the non system drives and then do a system recovery on it?

[Skybolt]

Sounds like your over-heating. Check the heat sinks and blow out the inside. unplug the power supply then blow that out seperatly. Check all fans are working. That's abou it. Good Luck.

-Skybolt

[will]

It could be a bad power supply. If you have an extra PSU, you might want to try swapping that out first before changing your heat-sink.

[Skybolt]

Originally Posted by will

It could be a bad power supply. If you have an extra PSU, you might want to try swapping that out first before changing your heat-sink.

Never said change the heat sink, somtimes the factory thermal compound is not so good and seperates. Some Artic Silver can't hurt. But A new PSU wouldn't hurt either.

[gplasky]

You should be able to pull out your data drives and plug them into another machine and copy them off to a different drive(s). Keep in mind you'll need to gather all the drives and all the files from the directories on each drive. Your files can be scattered among duplicate directories across all the drives.

Sounds like your OS drive went. You could try to get an OS on a bootable CD (like Linux) and see if you can boot to that. If your machine stays up and running and you don't see any errors from the booted OS then I would conclude your OS drive is shot. If so, you could get a new OS drive and attempt a reinstall of WHS. If you can't get it to reinstall then disconnect your data drives and do a new install with your data drives unplugged and just the OS drive being visable from the OS. After the install and all the updates/power packs shut down the machine, connect your data drives and boot. The WHS install should recognize them and begin to rebuild the tombstones. This can take a very long time and patience is a virtue.

Gerry

[medwynd]

Will reinstalling the OS destroy any data that was stored on that drive?

[gplasky]

If you can do a reinstall it won't affect the data drives. If you can't get a reinstall choice when trying to do this then it WILL destroy the data. In this case what I have done before is disconnect all the data drives. install the os and patches, shut down and connect the data drives back up and power up. You may see a dailog that asks if you want to add the data drives. Answer no and eventually it recognizes them and begins to rebuild the tombstones. YMMV.

Gerry

[medwynd]

Originally Posted by gplasky

If you can do a reinstall it won't affect the data drives. If you can't get a reinstall choice when trying to do this then it WILL destroy the data. In this case what I have done before is disconnect all the data drives. install the os and patches, shut down and connect the data drives back up and power up. You may see a dailog that asks if you want to add the data drives. Answer no and eventually it recognizes them and begins to rebuild the tombstones. YMMV.

Gerry

I guess I am more asking about the data that lives on the OS drive. Will that survive a server recovery/OS reinstall.

[gplasky]

What data? It's usually only the tombstones that reside on the D: drive of WHS. And if you are able to chose reinstall then nothing is affected. If you are talking programs installed on C then yes-you will need to reinstall all the apps and any add-ins. Copy the Sage directory off the server and then if you need to install Sage do so and then copy the backup over your new install. If you can't choose reinstall and have to do new you will lose everything on the D; drive. But if you do it as I described and connect your data drives after the os reinstall WHS should recognize it and rebuild the tombstones.

Gerry

[medwynd]

Originally Posted by gplasky

What data? It's usually only the tombstones that reside on the D: drive of WHS. And if you are able to chose reinstall then nothing is affected. If you are talking programs installed on C then yes-you will need to reinstall all the apps and any add-ins. Copy the Sage directory off the server and then if you need to install Sage do so and then copy the backup over your new install. If you can't choose reinstall and have to do new you will lose everything on the D; drive. But if you do it as I described and connect your data drives after the os reinstall WHS should recognize it and rebuild the tombstones.

Gerry

The drive was partitioned into 2, one a 20gig OS partition, the other a 1.3TB data partition. I just wanted to make sure that a reinstall didnt nuke the data partition.

[Chriscic]

I'm having a similar problem with my home-built WHS system. The system drive is just failing, although since my symptoms are similar to yours I am slightly worried maybe a virus may be involved. Hopefully not.

Anyway, my system drive also failed about 18 months ago and I did a "system restore" with the WHS DVD to get running again. Note that it tells you that you will lose anything not duplicated, but this is not true (at least it wasn't last time I did it). Just another reason I view WHS to be a half-***ed product, but I won't rant here.

I am in the middle of system restore right now. I replaced the boot drive with an identical model (I bought a long time ago for just this purpose). One thing I took note of both times is that WHS doesn't even ask you which drive to reinstall on, it just seems to do it again on disk 0 as far as I can tell. I don't know what I'll do if this happens again, because I don't know how to tell it to restore to a new SATA master drive (the old drives are ATA).

Will let you know how this round goes. Fortunately I was able to back up all of the vitals in case something goes awry; if I lose everything on the server (unlikely) it won't be devastating. Of course, again thank MS for a restore process that makes me worry about my data when the main point of WHS is to keep your data safe (at least for me).

[Chriscic]

Ack... attempts to system restore repeatedly failed. One thing was that this time I couldn't even get the system restore option unless I had the old, dying system drive attached. I don't understand, as last time I didn't need to do this. After the couple of attempts the old system drive finally totally died, I couldn't get the system restore option anymore, so I (extremely reluctantly) gave up on that and did a new installation (after disconnecting all data drives).

I'm back partially running now after many, many hours. My love/hate relationship with WHS continues.

It's great that you can easily access all your files even if the system drive goes down, but it's also a huge pain to copy everything back, especially with duplicates of all the files you backed up. I'm afraid that if I'm not super careful I might make a mistake and lose something important.

I would have just gone to WHS 2011, DE or no DE, but there's no Sage WHS version for that.

[medwynd]

I pulled the os drive and did a virus scan and a sector scan on it and everything was fine so I proceeded with a server recovery on sunday and that seemed to work. At least the WHS was rebooting. I did it with all the data drives disconnected.

The problem I have now is the the WHS connector will not reinstall on my client machine, a Vista 64 machine.

I remoted into the WHS to apply all the patches and attempted to install the connector again but it did not work.

One thing I did notice when I remoted in to the server is that there were errors in the error log, even after a fresh OS install.

I still dont have the data drives in and running because I do not have the connector installed. I think I am supposed to get the connector installed and then put my data drive back in the box and hope all the tombstones get rebuilt.

[gplasky]

I would get the drives connected sooner rather than later. Before the connector. It will take quite a while for all the tombstones to rebuild. Ignore any file conflicts until after everything is rebuilt. Make sure you go intop settings and you might need to reset up your domain for WHS. Install all the poerpacks and try installing the connector software from the web browser on your client machine. Don't use the connector software installed in the software directory.

Gerry

[medwynd]

But don't I need the connector to install the drives or should I just install them?

Once I install the drives will the tombstones automatically rebuild?

[Chriscic]

Originally Posted by medwynd

One thing I did notice when I remoted in to the server is that there were errors in the error log, even after a fresh OS install.

I believe that this is actually normal. I noticed some error messages popping up when I reinstalled previously, and if I recall correctly with a litte internet research I determined that for some reason this is normal behavior for a Windows Server 2003 (on which WHS is based) install.

Seems stupid to me, but that's MS for you.

[gplasky]

Originally Posted by medwynd

But don't I need the connector to install the drives or should I just install them?

Once I install the drives will the tombstones automatically rebuild?

Nope. Just install the drives and let it run.

The tombstones should automatically rebuild. But I'll say it again. It.......will.......take........some........time.

Gerry

[medwynd]

Originally Posted by gplasky

Nope. Just install the drives and let it run.

The tombstones should automatically rebuild. But I'll say it again. It.......will.......take........some........time.

Gerry

How can you tell when it's done? Should I disconnect it from the network?

EDIT: I installed the drives and the lights are all solid, not breathing or anything. Which makes me think its not rebuilding anything.
The hard drive and system lights are all solid and blue.
Looking at the event log these are the errors the OS is putting up:
Faulting application demigrator.exe, version 6.0.2423.0, faulting module deutil.dll, version 6.0.2423.0, fault address 0x0001a2cc.
Faulting application whsarch.exe, version 6.0.2423.0, faulting module deutil.dll, version 6.0.2423.0, fault address 0x0001a2cc.

There are a few of each of these. Neither of which seems good.

[medwynd]

Well I put the data drives back in the machine and attempted a server recovery again since I am running out of options to get this running.

Everything seemed to be going along fine, updates installed, etc. Then it said there was an error with backing up this computer. I didn't care because I didn't want it to back up the machine anyways. I clicked the next arrow which wanted me to cancel out of the install which I did because it was my only option.

Now the connector seems to be installed, it is telling me I have file errors and such. But I cannot login to the connector. It says my computer cannot login to the server. Also I cannot remote in, it just gets stuck at "applying your personal settings"

All of the lights are solid on the server and hard drives so it doesn't appear to be doing anything. I am leery of forcing a reboot at this point because I dont want to corrupt any data it may be rebuilding.

Ideas?

[gplasky]

Originally Posted by medwynd

Well I put the data drives back in the machine and attempted a server recovery again since I am running out of options to get this running.

Everything seemed to be going along fine, updates installed, etc. Then it said there was an error with backing up this computer. I didn't care because I didn't want it to back up the machine anyways. I clicked the next arrow which wanted me to cancel out of the install which I did because it was my only option.

Now the connector seems to be installed, it is telling me I have file errors and such. But I cannot login to the connector. It says my computer cannot login to the server. Also I cannot remote in, it just gets stuck at "applying your personal settings"

All of the lights are solid on the server and hard drives so it doesn't appear to be doing anything. I am leery of forcing a reboot at this point because I dont want to corrupt any data it may be rebuilding.

Ideas?

DO NOT REBOOT! Remember me telling you this? (It.......will.......take........some........time.) I wasn't kidding or exagerating. The lights on your drives (in both instances) were solid because that is all that is going on. It is SOLID disk activity and nothing else. And I am not surprised you can't log in. Because of the drive activity almost nothing else is going to be able to be done with that box. I remember once trying to log in while this kind of activity was occuring and it literally took an hour to log in and still I couldn't do anything. But the strategy for this is just forget about it and let it run. Depending on your the amount of data I have seen this process take over two days. Eventually you'll see the lgihts begin to slowly blink randomly. This means you're coming close to the finish line. YMMV.

Gerry