I've been running my WHS setup for about a year and a half with no real problems but now I'm starting to become concerned.
I have an Acer Easystore H430 running WHS v1 with SP2.
I purchased three 2TB Seagate Barracuda Green drives (ST2000DL003). All three purchased together and identical, although in the "Server Storage" tab two show as SCSI while one does not (this has always been the case which I thought was weird but never a problem and the one that reports oddly isn't the problem drive here). They are all in the storage pool.
A few days ago I hooked up a friend's external HDD to transfer over a couple of files. Got a warning that his drive had some errors but never had a problem copying any files to my HDDs or from me to him. Since then though, I have been hammered by constant file conflict emails and this is when the problems started. The "file conflicts" aren't real, as far as I can tell. They ALL show as "The system cannot find the drive specified" even though if I try to access the file it opens perfectly and with no signs of corruption.
Checking the "server storage" tab, one of the drives in the pool now shows as "not added" even though it is actively in the pool. The "calculating sizes" bar runs forever as well in this tab. I tried fixing that using google but no effect. Rebooting does nothing. Right clicking on it won't allow me to re-add it to the storage pool either. The best I could do is hot-pull the drive which reports it as "missing" and when I put it back in the drive shows as in the pool and healthy. Starting the computer with the drive out and putting it back in shows as "missing" but "not added" once it is re-added. The hot-pull-and-replace is the only way to get it back in there officially but a reboot returns to "not added".
If I go to C:\FS\X (which I believe is the drive with the problem since running the conflict resolver add-in only shows the other two drive letters in that folder) I notice something else strange. The folder layout is "old". That is to say, when I copied some things to my friend I put them in a temp folder from my actual layout. Then when it was done I moved them back. The c:\fs route shows them still in the temp folder. If I open the files, they work fine. Ditto for if i open those files via the d:\share path even though as I said they are officially in two different directories (one on the actual drive and one in the storage pool). If I rename the file in the d:\shares path it looks like drive extender will go to the drive and refresh that file (so it is removed from the "temp" folder in the c:\fs\x path and put into the "correct" folder in the c:\fs\x path which reflects where it actually is in the d:\shares path, if that makes any sense).
Is there any way to force drive extender to "refresh" all the files on that drive (the one in the storage pool that it likes to pretend isn't)? I think this is also the source of the conflicts (possibly) which appear to trigger an error even though there isn't actually a problem with the file.
The drive bay lights on my acer all indicate blue which means the drives are working fine and in the storage pool I believe. Only once, about two months ago, did something like this happen where the light went purple which I believe is drive is on but not added to the pool. It might be the same drive this time but I don't recall for sure. Anyways I think it was showing not in the pool even though it was so I removed it (slow) and readded it (slow) and that fixed the problem. Now I have enough data that I don't think it will let me remove the drive in issue and re-add it.
Something else that might be related - I have the home server SMART add in but it has never worked for me. None of my disks apparently will return SMART data when polled (never have, even since the beginning).
These drives don't get heavy usage nor are they that old. I am loathe to buy a new drive as like I said they aren't that old and I like that all three are the same model/age rather than cobbling together random drives of various ages.
I am about to try to force an unmounting and chkdsk of all drives although that will probably take quite a while and I don't know if it will produce any results. Failing that I might just manually remove some data and then try to remove the drive from the storage pool and re-add it and hope that works. If my drive is actually failing I want to remove/replace it but I can't figure out if this is actually the case or not (and like I said I can't get any SMART data off the drives). Haven't noticed any files missing or corrupted either.
As it seems to take FOREVER to do anything in WHS with this hardware setup (the acer runs great as a NAS I suppose but nobody will ever accuse it of being overpowered) trying to do anything with my 3+ TB of data is a huge pain. I have spent hours and hours on this over the past few days googling, reading threads and trying fixes, none of which work, so if anyone here can offer any help at all I would greatly appreciate it as I am on the verge of tearing my hair out. The whole purpose of me getting this thing setup was to consolidate my data in a place I could feel comfortable with!
I have also considered doing a WHS reset using the included acer WHS reset CD/DVD but I can't get a clear answer as to whether or not doing this will also wipe my storage pool (don't want that!!) so I'm not sure how to proceed there. If anyone has experience with this acer hardware and restoring/fixing/repairing a WHS install on the system drive without corrupting/losing the storage pool I would also like to hear about that (hopefully refreshing WHS would cure these issues!)
Thanks in advance guys and sorry about the TLDR post.
I have an Acer Easystore H430 running WHS v1 with SP2.
I purchased three 2TB Seagate Barracuda Green drives (ST2000DL003). All three purchased together and identical, although in the "Server Storage" tab two show as SCSI while one does not (this has always been the case which I thought was weird but never a problem and the one that reports oddly isn't the problem drive here). They are all in the storage pool.
A few days ago I hooked up a friend's external HDD to transfer over a couple of files. Got a warning that his drive had some errors but never had a problem copying any files to my HDDs or from me to him. Since then though, I have been hammered by constant file conflict emails and this is when the problems started. The "file conflicts" aren't real, as far as I can tell. They ALL show as "The system cannot find the drive specified" even though if I try to access the file it opens perfectly and with no signs of corruption.
Checking the "server storage" tab, one of the drives in the pool now shows as "not added" even though it is actively in the pool. The "calculating sizes" bar runs forever as well in this tab. I tried fixing that using google but no effect. Rebooting does nothing. Right clicking on it won't allow me to re-add it to the storage pool either. The best I could do is hot-pull the drive which reports it as "missing" and when I put it back in the drive shows as in the pool and healthy. Starting the computer with the drive out and putting it back in shows as "missing" but "not added" once it is re-added. The hot-pull-and-replace is the only way to get it back in there officially but a reboot returns to "not added".
If I go to C:\FS\X (which I believe is the drive with the problem since running the conflict resolver add-in only shows the other two drive letters in that folder) I notice something else strange. The folder layout is "old". That is to say, when I copied some things to my friend I put them in a temp folder from my actual layout. Then when it was done I moved them back. The c:\fs route shows them still in the temp folder. If I open the files, they work fine. Ditto for if i open those files via the d:\share path even though as I said they are officially in two different directories (one on the actual drive and one in the storage pool). If I rename the file in the d:\shares path it looks like drive extender will go to the drive and refresh that file (so it is removed from the "temp" folder in the c:\fs\x path and put into the "correct" folder in the c:\fs\x path which reflects where it actually is in the d:\shares path, if that makes any sense).
Is there any way to force drive extender to "refresh" all the files on that drive (the one in the storage pool that it likes to pretend isn't)? I think this is also the source of the conflicts (possibly) which appear to trigger an error even though there isn't actually a problem with the file.
The drive bay lights on my acer all indicate blue which means the drives are working fine and in the storage pool I believe. Only once, about two months ago, did something like this happen where the light went purple which I believe is drive is on but not added to the pool. It might be the same drive this time but I don't recall for sure. Anyways I think it was showing not in the pool even though it was so I removed it (slow) and readded it (slow) and that fixed the problem. Now I have enough data that I don't think it will let me remove the drive in issue and re-add it.
Something else that might be related - I have the home server SMART add in but it has never worked for me. None of my disks apparently will return SMART data when polled (never have, even since the beginning).
These drives don't get heavy usage nor are they that old. I am loathe to buy a new drive as like I said they aren't that old and I like that all three are the same model/age rather than cobbling together random drives of various ages.
I am about to try to force an unmounting and chkdsk of all drives although that will probably take quite a while and I don't know if it will produce any results. Failing that I might just manually remove some data and then try to remove the drive from the storage pool and re-add it and hope that works. If my drive is actually failing I want to remove/replace it but I can't figure out if this is actually the case or not (and like I said I can't get any SMART data off the drives). Haven't noticed any files missing or corrupted either.
As it seems to take FOREVER to do anything in WHS with this hardware setup (the acer runs great as a NAS I suppose but nobody will ever accuse it of being overpowered) trying to do anything with my 3+ TB of data is a huge pain. I have spent hours and hours on this over the past few days googling, reading threads and trying fixes, none of which work, so if anyone here can offer any help at all I would greatly appreciate it as I am on the verge of tearing my hair out. The whole purpose of me getting this thing setup was to consolidate my data in a place I could feel comfortable with!
I have also considered doing a WHS reset using the included acer WHS reset CD/DVD but I can't get a clear answer as to whether or not doing this will also wipe my storage pool (don't want that!!) so I'm not sure how to proceed there. If anyone has experience with this acer hardware and restoring/fixing/repairing a WHS install on the system drive without corrupting/losing the storage pool I would also like to hear about that (hopefully refreshing WHS would cure these issues!)
Thanks in advance guys and sorry about the TLDR post.
