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    I haven't had great cause to use this fiorum until now because my WHS has performed faultlessly for 9 months. I decided recently to add to the 1.5TB storage I have by adding another 1TB drive. The original 1.5tb is made up of 2 Samsung F1 750Mb drives. I got these becuase of good reports. The WHS recognised the new drive and I allovcated it as a drive to be used to expand storage and not for backup. All went well.

    Then yesterday I checked the server and the hard disc light was on with no other activity. No access from Connector or remote access. So with not alternative I rebooted only to be get the message Boot Disc Failure please insert disc (can't remember the exact text). So next thought was to get the original instal disc. This done and choosing the reinstall option it took several hours to get to what appeared to be a functioning installation. Atfer serveral reboots. I then inserted the motherboard driver disc and installed the various drivers from that. On rebooting I got the same maessage: Boot disc failure etc.

    Havinf no alternative I reinstalled again and instead of leaving the mobo disc intall driver on its own I tried installing one by one the first being Asus Cool n quiet driver. This required a reboot and lo and behold same message again: Boot Disc failure. In between I moved the new disc to a different location in the case since it was in clsoe proximity to the other drives and I though the extra heat might be causeing a problem. I am currently reinstalling, this time I will only install the lan driver and the chipset/SM bus driver.

    Any ideas as to the cause? Is the primary drive failing or is there some failure in the set up? I can't get anywhere near installing the PP1 atm.

    Monday, February 9, 2009 3:41 PM

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    Hi,
    you do not need to reinstall the Connector software.
    After all updates are applied to the server, run discovery.exe from C:\Program Files\Windows Home Server on each client PC ro reestablish the connection to your server.

    Best greetings from Germany
    Olaf
    Thursday, February 12, 2009 10:24 PM
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    Llew21 said:

    I haven't had great cause to use this fiorum until now because my WHS has performed faultlessly for 9 months. I decided recently to add to the 1.5TB storage I have by adding another 1TB drive. The original 1.5tb is made up of 2 Samsung F1 750Mb drives. I got these becuase of good reports. The WHS recognised the new drive and I allovcated it as a drive to be used to expand storage and not for backup. All went well.

    Then yesterday I checked the server and the hard disc light was on with no other activity. No access from Connector or remote access. So with not alternative I rebooted only to be get the message Boot Disc Failure please insert disc (can't remember the exact text). So next thought was to get the original instal disc. This done and choosing the reinstall option it took several hours to get to what appeared to be a functioning installation. Atfer serveral reboots. I then inserted the motherboard driver disc and installed the various drivers from that. On rebooting I got the same maessage: Boot disc failure etc.

    Havinf no alternative I reinstalled again and instead of leaving the mobo disc intall driver on its own I tried installing one by one the first being Asus Cool n quiet driver. This required a reboot and lo and behold same message again: Boot Disc failure. In between I moved the new disc to a different location in the case since it was in clsoe proximity to the other drives and I though the extra heat might be causeing a problem. I am currently reinstalling, this time I will only install the lan driver and the chipset/SM bus driver.

    Any ideas as to the cause? Is the primary drive failing or is there some failure in the set up? I can't get anywhere near installing the PP1 atm.



    It sounds to me like your primary drive (or the data cable for that drive) is failing.  I would start replacing the hard drive, then do a Server Reinstallation.
    Monday, February 9, 2009 3:52 PM
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    The strange thing is is that the server reboots several times in the course of installation with not ill effects, however, I had come to the conclusion that i would have to replace the hard drive and cable, I am still hopeing to avoid that......

    Is it just a simple matter of replacing the drive and reinstalling? No data will be lost?

    If it is the drive then this will be the second Samsung drive within the last couple of months.
    Monday, February 9, 2009 4:04 PM
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    Llew21 said:

    The strange thing is is that the server reboots several times in the course of installation with not ill effects, however, I had come to the conclusion that i would have to replace the hard drive and cable, I am still hopeing to avoid that......

    Is it just a simple matter of replacing the drive and reinstalling? No data will be lost?

    That depends.  If you had Folder Duplication active on all shares, then you shouldn't lose any data stored in the shares.  (You might still lose your backup database, depending on whether any portion of the database was on the primary drive.)

    Llew21 said:

    If it is the drive then this will be the second Samsung drive within the last couple of months.



    Monday, February 9, 2009 4:11 PM
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    Can you refresh my memory and explain how I can find out if folder duplication was trned on? or point me to a resource.


    Would it help if I could somehow manage to clone the primary disc?

    many thanks for your replies.
    Monday, February 9, 2009 4:20 PM
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    I just got the server up and running. I am afraid to reboot now just in case it goes down again. I have just checked and all the folders and shares have duplication turned on so a new primary drive would be in order.

    I presume that there is no reason why AsusCool n Quiet driver should cause sutch a problem?


    EDIT

    I have just rebooted and the same message: DISK BOOT FAILURE, INSERT SYSTEM DISC AND PRESS ENTER.



    I still don't understand why the darn thing should boot so many times while installing the OS and then fail when I attempt to do it. This makes me think that it is not the disk.

    BTW I have replaced the sata cable with a new one and given the 2 Samsung discs power from a different power line from the PS with no effect.
    Monday, February 9, 2009 4:30 PM
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    Hi,
    there are some possible reasons:
    • the system disk has technical issues/dies (or the cabling does not sit well), because a disk boot failure seems to me more at the hardware level
    • the mass storage drivers are not provided properly (but this would usually give a nice BSOD 0x0000007B
    • the boot sequence in Bios is wrong

    Best greetings from Germany
    Olaf
    • Marked as answer by Jonas Svensson -FST- Tuesday, February 10, 2009 3:01 PM
    • Unmarked as answer by Llew21 Wednesday, February 11, 2009 7:03 AM
    Monday, February 9, 2009 10:05 PM
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    Llew21 said:

    I just got the server up and running. I am afraid to reboot now just in case it goes down again. I have just checked and all the folders and shares have duplication turned on so a new primary drive would be in order.

    I presume that there is no reason why AsusCool n Quiet driver should cause sutch a problem?


    EDIT

    I have just rebooted and the same message: DISK BOOT FAILURE, INSERT SYSTEM DISC AND PRESS ENTER.



    I still don't understand why the darn thing should boot so many times while installing the OS and then fail when I attempt to do it. This makes me think that it is not the disk.

    BTW I have replaced the sata cable with a new one and given the 2 Samsung discs power from a different power line from the PS with no effect.



    Did you try taking out the 1 TB drive?  Perhaps its causing your issues (since your problems started around the same time as when you added it).
    Tuesday, February 10, 2009 12:19 AM
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    Are you sure it isn't a RAM issue or another failing piece of hardware? You can run MemTest86 on the station to see what happens there. Run some system tools on the HDD's off the system. Maybe check the BIOS after a good amount of time and check the CPU temp. You doing any OC'ing on the system? Voltage good for the RAM???? Many possible reasons.
    PACS Technical Support Engineer
    Tuesday, February 10, 2009 3:20 AM
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    Olaf

    When I first installed the new ITB disc it was placed between the 2 Samsung discs. I suspect they may have got quite warm. However, all was well  once I had done it and several backups ocurred since doing it. I did defrag the drives using the WHS inbuilt defrager but some days later on looking at the machine in the morning the hard disc light was on and no activity present. Where I sleep I am not too far away from the machine and i can remember hearing some HD activity when dozing occurring at about 5-6 am. I don't recall hearing it before.

    I have replaced the cableing and changed power cable.

    I presume the mass storage driver are the ones that come with WHS?

    I have changed the boot sequence to HD from the CDROM it was when installing


    kariya21

    I have removed the !TB drive and no it did not help. Interestingly the sequence of drives listed in the BIOS shows Samsung: Seagate: Samsung even though the drives are plugged in in the following sequence: Sata1 Samsung Sata2 Samsung Sata 3 Seagate. Just in case BIOS was trying to boot from the wrong drive I swopped Seagate to Sata2 and Samsung to Sata3. Still no change although it showed the correct sequence in the BIOS

    Z06_Dude


    No OC'ing, all bog standard. I will be away for the next couple of days so no chance to test anything but what gets me is that WHS installs without a hitch and reboots probaly 6-7times and the whole process takes about 2-3hours probably rebuliding the toombstones so lots of HD activity. But as soon as I try to reboot after install it fails. This is of course after installing the Asus drivers. I have not tryed to reboot without installing drivers.

    All the drives are SATA so since the drive sequence in BIOS lists the PATA ports first I added a pata drive whic already has XP on it hopeing it would boot from that.... Still same message.

    I am wondering if the Bios has become corrupted so I might reset it. or perhaps if there is a bIOS upgrade I will install that.


    Many thanks for all your help everyone.
    Tuesday, February 10, 2009 9:48 PM
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    I though before I finally went off to bed that I would disconnect all SATA drives and try to boot from the PATA drive with XP. It booted up. So it looks like I will be ordering a new 1TB drive tomorrow..... sigh
    Tuesday, February 10, 2009 9:58 PM
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    It appears your new drive is a Seagate 1tb hard drive.  There have been issues with the 7200.11 generation of Seagate drives resulting in them failing or acting erratically.

    You may check to see if your hard drive requires the firmware here.
    Wednesday, February 11, 2009 2:13 AM
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    Chris H

    Thanks for that. I checked and the drive is one of the ones that don't need an update.


    Right, here's the thing. After having tried (successfuly) the aforementioned PATA drive to boot the system I reconnected the SATA drives 2x Samsung and one Seagate. The intention being that I would reinstall WHS and take off all the files I want to keep (without rebooting of course) and then reinstall the whole thing. So i started the computer and WHS stared up..........and stayed up, even to the point of installing loads of WHS/Windows updates AND rebooting.

    I think now the best stratery is to reinstall the whole thing while weeding out the faulty(?) Samsung drive. I dont need to keep the backups I have just the photos and music.

    I am still curious how this has happened. Appart from the drive and cabling/contacts being faulty I thought that maybe the BIOS had something to do with it. I can't remember that name of it now but there is a device pool that the BIOS creates on boot that tells the OS what devices are conected to the system. If that is not updated and becomes corrupt then there is an error in booting. ISTR that I had this happen on another PC build of mine a while back.

    I can't now backup to the WHS, the item is greyed out, so I guess I will have to reinstall that too.


    Many thanks all for your help

    • Marked as answer by Llew21 Thursday, February 12, 2009 10:09 PM
    • Unmarked as answer by Llew21 Thursday, February 12, 2009 10:09 PM
    Thursday, February 12, 2009 9:42 PM
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    Hi,
    you do not need to reinstall the Connector software.
    After all updates are applied to the server, run discovery.exe from C:\Program Files\Windows Home Server on each client PC ro reestablish the connection to your server.

    Best greetings from Germany
    Olaf
    Thursday, February 12, 2009 10:24 PM
    Moderator