Windows Home Server [Huge Problems]

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n1ce_hat

Gawd
Joined
May 17, 2006
Messages
697
Okay. Something has been terribly wrong for the last few weeks. It all started when a 750GB drive died that I had my OS installed to. That was bad. If you take a drive from the drive pool and plug it into a computer it shows up as a HDD labelled 'DATA' and (once you allow viewing hidden files) you can see whatever data happened to be on that disk, and you can transfer those files wherever. It's not pretty but you can get the data.

Now, once the OS was unable to load I bought a new 1TB and installed WHS to it. I noticed right away that everything was slow. I figured maybe it was because I reduced to stock clock speeds but after increasing them to 3GHz it didn't make sense. When I click on the WHS Console it takes like a minute to load. Switching between tabs in the console takes like 10-30 seconds, maybe longer. I installed the Disk Management tab and it takes forever to do anything with, and no longer tells me my disk activity or temps. After a couple weeks of getting the data off of my drives, I grabbed the data that was on the untrustworthy 750GB. Everything was fine. It never had a problem again, I was able to unload all 750GB and no errors. I liked it so much that I put that drive back in the new storage pool. Well after moving another 750GB to it, I could hear my RocketRaid's alarm go off and it tells me the drive is dead once again. Joy. So I'll worry about that data later, but in the meantime I cleaned off my 1TB and installed Windows Home Server to it again. Installed all drivers, Power Pack 1, and all updates, and it's still mega slow! And I mean, slow. Transferring data between drives is fine but when you drag a window around it takes a few seconds to load the window, regardless even 'My Computer' or something. It's very strange.

I'm getting a conflict in one of my folders, I don't know if you guys have seen the 'File Conflicts' window ever show up? The status cannot be cleared no matter what you do, I had to deal with it for 6 months one time before I reloaded WHS. Moving 16TB around to fix an error label is quite a task, but it's happening once again. It says it cannot move the files into the folder but it doesn't make sense because I did not transfer the data any more different.

Regardless, let me know what you guys think, in the meantime I might install XP or Server03 in the meantime. I sure miss having the drive pool and all the fancy folders, but it's taken me weeks to try and fix this problem and every time I have to move 10-12TB around and it's just not worth it.
 
That sounds like the same symptoms you used to get with IDE drives where they'd load up in PIO mode - I don't think that's possible with SATA drives, but it might be worth checking.

Have you tried loading up your OS onto a different (smaller) drive?
 
:LJ: said:
That sounds like the same symptoms you used to get with IDE drives where they'd load up in PIO mode - I don't think that's possible with SATA drives, but it might be worth checking.

Have you tried loading up your OS onto a different (smaller) drive?
Click to expand...

I mean, I do have a 500 here that I could install to. Would take me a little while to empty it. This 1TB Seagate is brand new. It was bought to install WHS on to fix the problem, like a week ago. Should I go for the 500?
 
n1ce_hat said:
I mean, I do have a 500 here that I could install to. Would take me a little while to empty it. This 1TB Seagate is brand new. It was bought to install WHS on to fix the problem, like a week ago. Should I go for the 500?
Click to expand...

What have you got to lose by trying?
 
:LJ: said:
What have you got to lose by trying?
Click to expand...

Other than time, nothing really. I just find it strange that sometimes the server is crazy slow, sometimes its normal speed. I think it may have something to do with how much data is stored on the OS's disk. With all my drives in limbo and storage tight, I had to let WHS put data on the OS's disk. When the drive hits 60%+, things start to get slow, when the disk has <50%, things appear normal. I don't know, I was ready to reformat just now and it started to act normal again. It's very unpredictable and frustrating. I think for the meantime I'm going to let the OS live for a couple more days.

When the server only had 1 disk on a new installation, clearing off a 2nd disk to get ready to add was agony. The OS becomes almost unusable, every input takes 5-10 seconds to respond. I guess once it had a fresh disk and unloaded some data onto it, things improved but only for a short time until I started to move data around.

I think that might be what is going on. I really hope so.

Now the file conflicts thing is bugging me because there is no solution by Microsoft. Googling around found some interesting topics, it seems to be a common problem. I've had it happen 3 or 4 times to me, I might just have to deal with it.

WeGotServed.co.uk said:
A number of Windows Home Server users on WGS and Microsoft’s WHS forums are reporting a File Conflict error occuring in their WHS systems with PP1 installed.
When this occurs it has proven difficult and in some cases impossible to fix the conflict by deleting the files identified as being the cause. This error also seems to be effecting the Backup database with a Backup service is not running also being reported.

Could this be a bug introduced by PP1?

I have experienced these issues myself and found that a Server reinstall has been the only way to “fix” it - however it reoccurs. The other options appears to be to delete the Backup database which I’ve been reluctant to do and start over as it currently has over 3 months of backups in it.
Click to expand...

It's annoying as hell because right now I just moved some 5-6TB into this current installation of WHS, and already I have conflicts. I now know that these will be here until I reformat, but if I reformat it will only be a matter of time until I get more conflicts. Horrible.

And now I have to figure out why my Disk Management add-in no longer tells me my HDD usage or temps. That's half the reason I install the thing is so I can see which drives are spinning. It's either my RocketRaid driver (same driver I always use...), the version of Disk Management (probably), or maybe it's the monsters under my bed.
 
The drive temp problem could be due to the drive either not supporting SMART (unlikely with a modern drive) or the controller being unable to switch SMART on for that drive (I have no experience with that controller, so I couldn't say).
 
Check process CPU use when the problem happens.
 
:LJ: said:
The drive temp problem could be due to the drive either not supporting SMART (unlikely with a modern drive) or the controller being unable to switch SMART on for that drive (I have no experience with that controller, so I couldn't say).
Click to expand...

Well, for some reason my RocketRaid has never reported the temps of my drives, I found it odd but I haven't really looked into it deeply. However there are 4 drives hooked up to the mainboard and normally they report the temps. I'm sure there's a reason for it but last time I reformatted I didn't get the temps or drive speeds, either.

I feel weird whenever I look at my thread name 'Huge Problems' because it should have been 'Huge Frustrations' lol. Although there are problems in the situation, like for some reason my PC bluescreened during WHS installation. I was shocked, that's never a good sign when the things not even done installing!! I hard rebooted and installation proceeded as normal. Don't know how related it is but things are working normally (although slow at times).

I wish I could afford to buy tons of brand new hard drives, I'm sure the server would just love me if it had tons of free space. I have a few hard drives here that simply contain backups of other drives, I'd format those but at this point it would suck to lose the precious data. The 750GB Seagate that died a horrible, horrible death really took a bite out of my free space, having the extra drive helped when adding drives into the storage pool.

edit: OKAY nevermind the drive temps and whatnot, I guess I had forgotten that you have to manually turn on that feature within the settings of the console. Still slow doing anything, though. Temps work fine but it is having an issue with updating the amount of data on the drives. With "My Computer" it reports properly, but in the Disk Management tab it's only refreshing the percent of data on each of the drives when I click the button to manually refresh, or reopen the console. Annoying.
 
n1ce_hat said:
I wish I could afford to buy tons of brand new hard drives, I'm sure the server would just love me if it had tons of free space. I have a few hard drives here that simply contain backups of other drives, I'd format those but at this point it would suck to lose the precious data. The 750GB Seagate that died a horrible, horrible death really took a bite out of my free space, having the extra drive helped when adding drives into the storage pool.
Click to expand...

There's a valuable lesson here - never have more data than you can possibly store at least twice. Personally, I'd try to start pruning your data to the point where you can store two copies of it. That way, you don't have to have a mad panic every time something goes horribly wrong.

Just a friendly suggestion :)
 
:LJ: said:
There's a valuable lesson here - never have more data than you can possibly store at least twice. Personally, I'd try to start pruning your data to the point where you can store two copies of it. That way, you don't have to have a mad panic every time something goes horribly wrong.

Just a friendly suggestion :)
Click to expand...

A great suggestion. I have about 60ish% of my data on backup drives, it would be nice to have the full 100% but as most of us know, data balloons quickly. It's just been such a pain in the ass getting all the data back in the shared folders from the old pool's drives. You have to do it one folder at a time, so like 10 folders per drive. Once I start up a 300GB transfer and walk away for a half hour or so.. "Are you sure you want to move the read-only.." YES of course I do! Click yes and come back in a bit "This folder already contains a folder with the same name..." Augh over and over, every folder on every drive. Half the time it takes to empty all the drives is spent waiting for me to click 'Yes'. I need one of those drinking birds like Homer has...
 
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