DaveO

One of the old pool disks had some media files in a shares folder in the DE folder. All three of the old pool drives are holding backup files from v1 in the DE folder (backing up 4 computers). This is where the bulk of other data is coming from. I guess I can delete the DE folders as I have zero intention of going back to v1. I did notice that whs 2011 is storing backup data unduplicated in the data portion of the system drive. Can I move that into the pool for duplication ?

The old server drives show 3.5 years of service, they are in the external enclosure and still appear to be holding all or most of the data. None have hit the 90% limit. I don't know how to force the data off the old drives. Do you have a wiki for that ? The pool performance bar is now solid aqua. Drive pool shows 797 GB duplicated and 824 GB other. I'm not sure what the other data is. All the files were moved into the drive pool.

I followed your wiki to a T. The pool server folders are fully populated, music, movies, etc. I have a permission issue somewhere. Clients can watch videos that I moved into the servers original video folder for example. Got it, shared pool folders via dashboard server folders tab. Thank you for all your help. Now I need to get rid of the old drives, one at a time.

Finally was able to repair the drive and get pool performance to 100% ! Now I need to replace the drive with a bad sector. I thought scanner would evacuate a drive with a bad sector. I guess there are some settings I don't have right. I also must have permissions messed up. I've tried sharing, permissions, unhiding files, but server folders remain empty to clients. I want to see folders from any network device, like blue rays and tvs. I don't get to work on this everyday, but I'm trying.

I uploaded a log file. I believe the problem exists the 2nd of 3 drives in the sans digital. When duplication stopped, I found the 2nd and 3rd drive indicator lights off. I'm going to try to copy the data off of it and replace the drive. Edit: Smart shows that the drive has a bad sector. Duplication stops when it's working on a file I don't really care about. So I'll manually duplicate the other folders.

I'll make a log file and upload it. Do you have any experience with the bios file that si provides ? I'm leery of changing the bios, but will do it if needed. I assume that has to be done with a thumb drive.

The TR5M+B defaulted to pass through, which is where I'll leave it. I still need to work through some issues with sharing and duplication. These issues seem to be causing the added drives to drop out during duplication.

I'm having a hard time getting SI 3531 to install. When I try to update the driver, windows decides the driver is up to date. There's another device in the list titled Mass Storage Controller that does not have a driver and when I try to update that driver windows doesn't show the file as an option. Frustrating. Finally got the driver installed, now I see the 3 disks in the 5 bay sans digital. Thank you Christopher for all your help. Now I can execute your wiki. I'm using the SI Raid5 manager, trying to configure as jbod, it may default to that, but I haven't figured it out yet.

The mediasonic appears to be the issue. When I try to add the unpooled drives into the pool, drive pool locks up at 90% and there is no drive activity lights on the probox. Thankfully, I bought it through amazon. It's going back. I need a reliable external storage, maybe sans digital. Tomorrow I'll swap the drives out an try to recover my data.

Tried connecting with usb 2 and all the unpooled drives showed up. There's an issue with one of the ports or the cable. Will trouble shoot that later as I need to get the data on the mediasonic drive duplicated, tons of photos, videos and music on there. One question, I copied videos to the to the video folder which shows up on the e:\ drive. Drive pool hasn't duplicated the files yet and I have real time duplication on. Is there a sharing issue ? Edit: never mind, just read your wiki

AHCI 1.0 Serial ATA Controller, provided by Microsoft, written by Intel and supports port multiplier. StableBit 2.1.561_x64_Release The disks in the mediasonic are the pool disks from the ex495 before the sys drive crashed. I don't see them in drive pool as as unpooled, in fact I don't see an unpooled disk tab. I don't see the mediasonic disks in disk management either. I found the pool tab and enabled duplication. I copied some videos over to the server last night and streamed them to a blue ray player and worked fine. I'm going to google whs2011 and mediasonic and see what I can find.

Trying restarting the ex495 with the sync settings on the mediasonic turned off. Didn't work, still can't see the mediasonic hooked up via esata. Gotta go, won't be able to mess with it again for 5-6 hours.

Thanks Christopher, I got the mediasonic to work, the literature that comes with it is lacking. The StableBit add in is not showing much of a dashboard, unlike the scanner add in. In fact, Stablebit only shows drive pool G with 4 drives in the ex495. Is it possible it did not install properly ? I uninstalled it from my computer before installing it via remote desktop on whs2011. I'm not seeing any tabs to add drives, turn on duplication, etc. Thanks for the wiki link, that will be helpful. It has a setting button, add a pool button and a performance button. When I try to add a pool, it doesn't show any disks available.

I know it's been a while since I posted, but here it goes.......Hardware upgrade went smoothly. All upgrades were quickly apparent. How anyone could make it through an upgrade to 2011 without the video cable is a testament to incredible fortitude. Wow. All in all, a much peppier server, and I'm just starting with add ins. I bought the scanner/drive pool add ins. The scanner installed easily. The drive pool was an exe, and unfortunately I installed it on a client. Took a while, but I finally installed it on the server on a trial basis (wouldn't take the original key, not to my surprise). Guess I'll have to buy another key. I did not know that whs2011 did not automatically format pool drives, like v1. What a dumbass. I tried my old pool drives in a mediasonic, it does not recognize the esata connection and immediately powers off. Not sure at this point if the mediasonic (which is where my old pool drives reside) is causing problems or if StableBit DrivePool is the problem.

Thanks Um, all I'm waiting for is the cable to get started. I come home from work today, turn on my computer only to get a notification from my tray that my computer's antivirus software isn't running.........damn thing must've updated itself into existence ! I can remote into it now ! Something to play with tonight after my daughter's softball practice. It's also nice enough to tell me that I don't have an account set up......software didn't get that far.

I'll post a followup after I get all the hardware installed, 2011 installed and of course your StableBit products. Thank you for all your help. I know you're busy with all the forums you moderate. It may be next weekend before I can get all of that done. Is there a native drive service in 2011 that I need to disable when running StableBit drive pool ? Should I wipe the system drive before installing 2011 ? Can't wait to get Serviio running again.

Got everything on order. Ran a restore with the data drives pulled. Everything went well until the updates hung at 52% and stopped progressing. I don't have time to mess with it everyday, so I think I'll quit torturing myself until I can install the cable. My guess is that the server didn't reboot at some point during the updates. It obtains an IP and sometimes shows up as hpstorage and sometimes as the name I gave it. I can't remote into it, or connect to it. The windows 7 computer I used for the set up saves the ip in a system32 host file. Don't know why it would do that since the ip could change. I had to change the ip in the file, then reserve it on the router. The host file had saved the ip from when I tried to run a recovery at the beginning of the thread. Uninstalling the whs connector software doesn't clean the host file. I guess XP didn't write to that file, oh well. Wasn't the server's fault. Fun little exercise learning how to enable a real administrator account. Until I did all that, I couldn't initiate the connector software. Good news is that it seems like the hardware is ok. Is it worth the effort to install v1 with the HP software, then install 2011 ? Or just run with the 2011 install ?

Got it, trying to find the software at a decent price, hardware on order.

That's great advice. I didn't realize there was v1 version of StableBit. So if I do a restore, then disable DE which I'll guess is running as a service, add in StableBit. At this point I could add my drives back like you've documented and not worry about DE formatting them ? That sounds good. Thanks again !

Thanks for the cable link ! That looks incredibly useful. I think I'm going to do a restore with just the system disk in before I spend more money on it. I appreciate the help.

I'd like to upgrade the cpu and ram, then install whs2011 and be done with it for a while. Probably reuse the current pool disks in a jbod setup for more storage. I don't care about the mhs software, I'd put in plex or servio, stablebit and others.

I went ahead and ran recovery on v1 with a new red drive. Installation went smoothly, but it took a long time, almost 12 hrs to pop on the network with the assigned name. The connector software didn't let me assign user accounts and whs console couldn't find the server, neither could rdt. I recycled power and was finally able to rdt into the server, and it flashed a warning that drive extender wasn't running. I checked the pool drives and they still have data on them. I shut down the server and pulled them out. I really wanted to see if there was a hardware issue other than the dead system drive before I spent money on upgrading the unit. I'm decent at managing our home network, because I'm curious by nature, but I'm not a hardware guy. I can rdt into the server one time, if I do it quickly after cycling the power. After that the rdt cannot find the server. It shows up on the router all the time as having an address on the network. There's a system problem, but how can I determine if it's hardware or software.

Never mind on the 2011 install, I found a link. I had file duplication on when the system disk crashed. Should I go ahead and recover v1 with the pool drives installed, then after all the updating, etc, turn file duplication off, turn off the server, remove the drives and install 2011 with StableBit ? I don't want StableBit to reduplicate files already duplicated. Or is StableBit smart enough not to do that ?

Christopher, thank you for taking the time to respond. If I go to whs 2011, do I lose the media smart interface ? Is there a simple way to install ?

I'm waiting on some new red drives to get here so that I can do a recovery. I have a ton of data, movies, pictures, movies of the kids, etc and I don't have backups. On some other forums, I've read where some folks have lost all their data trying to do a recovery in v1. From reading this forum, I see several how to's using your stable bit app. There's a whs 2011 64 bit on ebay for $150. Since you can't buy it retail anymore, is that my best bet for a safe recovery ? Are the new features of 2011 worth that much ? I tried a recovery with a green drive (pre AF) that I took out of an old ehd and the process failed trying to write to the drive. I've since learned that the green drive isn't a good choice for a system disk. I use three green drives that I ran wdidle and the alignment tool on and they work fine. I'm going to move them to an enclosure and expand my network. Any advice would be appreciated.