Sign in
Microsoft.com
 
Microsoft
 
 
 

locked
WHS 2011 freezing occasionally running on Acer H340 hardware RRS feed

 > 

  • Question

  • Question
    Sign in to vote
    0
    Sign in to vote

    I have an Acer H340 that has been changed to use an SSD for the system drive and is running Windows Home Server 2011. Aside from most of the front panel lights not working, WHS2011 seems to run well normally. BUT, occasionally the system locks up completely. This has happened many times at intervals of between 1 and 3 weeks. It's always happened at night when I'm not around so I don't know of anything in particular that triggers it. When it freezes, there's no error message on the screen nor do the mouse or keyboard work at all (I've left a monitor, keyboard, and mouse attached for testing). The network light flickers but I'm assuming that is a strictly hardware function. The Drive activity light is on solid.

    I left Task Manager running for the last crash and here's a screenshot (note that it's a static screen and not changing as Windows is completely dead).

    Anyone have any thoughts as to what might be happening? Since I'm not getting a BSOD I don't have much to work with.

    Tuesday, April 24, 2012 9:52 PM

All replies

  • Question
    Sign in to vote
    0
    Sign in to vote

    "The network light flickers but I'm assuming that is a strictly hardware function. The Drive activity light is on solid."

    Copy speed between server and client was really poor. This just happens to me and found out a data drive was dying. Changed the HDD and now all is well.

    Claude

    Tuesday, April 24, 2012 10:23 PM
    Moderator
  • Question
    Sign in to vote
    0
    Sign in to vote
    I would try running MemTest86+ to confirm whether your memory is fine. Does your SSD meet the minimum requirement for WHS2011 (160GB)?

    Phil P.S. If you find my comment helpful or if it answers your question, please mark it as such.

    Tuesday, April 24, 2012 10:48 PM
  • Question
    Sign in to vote
    0
    Sign in to vote

    Claude:

    It's possible the SSD has a problem, but it's new and in the past I've found SSD's to fail hard when they go (i.e. the work until they don't). I'd found some error entries in the System Event Log related to iastor ("The device, \Device\Ide\iaStor0, did not respond within the timeout period") and I tried updating the Intel SATA drivers to no particular effect. In response to this I tried disabling the Link Power Management (LPM) stuff as suggested on some websites, again to no effect. Any idea how to translate the "\Device\Ide\iaStor0" into which physical drive that actually is?

    Phil:

    That's easy enough to do, I'll try running MemTest86+ and see how it goes. I installed WHS2011 on a regular hard drive first and then copied the partition to the SSD. It's only a 60 GB drive so I couldn't have installed directly to the drive, but it does work. I've got the 100 MB reserved partition, about 56GB (48% full) for the boot partition, and no data partition on the SSD. While it's outside the normal WHS configuration, I don't think that's what's causing my problems. This feels to me more like a hardware/driver problem of some sort. The SSD seems like a likely candidate, but hoping I could pin it down a bit before going the drive swapping route.


    Thanks for the ideas guys!

    Wednesday, April 25, 2012 12:51 AM
  • Question
    Sign in to vote
    0
    Sign in to vote
    Memory testing went fine I ran both the Windows Memory diagnostic (the one that's an option on the boot screen) and MemTest86+ for over 12 hours. No issues detected.
    Wednesday, April 25, 2012 3:53 PM
  • Question
    Sign in to vote
    0
    Sign in to vote
    Good. When I am looking for hardware problems, I generally progress to stressing the system with Prime. I have had SSDs fail progressively introducing all manner of unexplained problems rather than a complete failure. Do you have the original disk you copied from to swap out the SSD?

    Phil P.S. If you find my comment helpful or if it answers your question, please mark it as such.

    Wednesday, April 25, 2012 4:10 PM
  • Question
    Sign in to vote
    0
    Sign in to vote

    I don't have the original disk around any longer, but I have other non-SSD drives I could use. In some ways I wish the failure occurred more often. As it is I'll have to clone the drive, swap them, and then maybe wait a month to decide if it fixed anything. <sigh>

    I wanted to boost the performance of the Acer box and the SSD did that nicely. Unfortunately it has a wimpy (non-upgradeable) CPU and only supports 2GB of RAM so there's not much besides the SSD I can do to help it along.

    Thursday, April 26, 2012 6:24 AM