Tag Archives: HP

11.28.11
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EX495 WHS Server Recovery Successful

I finally ran through the Server Recovery process on my HP EX495 Windows Home Server over the weekend.  My WHS has been acting up for a while now and I have been unable to fix it.  It was visible on my home network through \\ServerName mapping but WHS Connector wouldn’t work and the Server had stopped backing up the clients.

A WHS that doesn’t do backups isn’t real useful, it is just an expensive media and file server.  After trying to track down a solution several times over the last two months, I gave up and decided I’d have to do a Server Recovery.  I was apprehensive about doing this to say the least.  I have all of our family pictures on my WHS so I needed to copy them to another drive before I could go through the recovery process even though it is supposed to be non-destructive.  I also had some video and a reasonably large music library.  All in all, about 4.5GB of stuff to copy somewhere while I did the recovery.

Thanksgiving weekend seemed like a good weekend to do this since I would be home and could monitor the process I expected to take a while.  Copying all of the pictures took the longest – I have about 35,000 digital pictures spanning about 10 years – they pile up!  Once I got everything copied and felt that if everything disappeared I wouldn’t be completely SOL, I started the recovery process.  I followed the procedure and it went exactly as described.  The whole process took about two hours and left me with a WHS which was working again.  I was thrilled to see that none of my data was gone – everything (pictures, videos, music, etc.) was all there just as it was before I did the recovery.  Whew!

The server was a bit slow throughout the day as in addition to trying to reconfigure all of the clients, of which I have seven or eight, the WHS was also updating itself with the various Windows Updates which have been released since the media was created.

This morning I got up to check on it and was happy to see that my laptop had been backed up and my wife’s PC was almost done.  Yeah.  A level of comfort has been restored.  I am not exactly sure why my WHS went AWOL on me, I added to modules to it:  Tivo and McAfee.  I no longer use a Tivo so there is zero reason to re-install that and I am on the fence about McAfee.  Actually, based on this article, it looks like there is no reason to install McAfee again since it isn’t supported any longer.  Avast appears to be an option, I’ll have to do some digging to see if it will really work.  I have no desire to go through this process again anytime soon!

10.06.11
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My Windows Home Server is driving me crazy

About a year ago after a catastrophic data loss from my wife’s computer (which I’ll admit was largely my fault for not having a recent backup) I bought a Windows Home Server.  I have the HP EX490 and when I first set it up, did everything it was advertised to do flawless.  The setup was simple, setting up backups of all of our computers (6 of them) just worked, I had a ton of storage where I could put photos and videos – life was good from a home IT perspective.

I am not exactly sure when but several months ago I realized I was no longer able to connect to my WHS using the Windows Home Server Connector client.  This was annoying but not a complete show stopper as I was able to login via Remote Desktop Connection and everything looks pretty good.  Backups were still running, I was still able to access the shared drives normally, etc.  Just the WHS Connector wasn’t working.

Earlier this week my wife was telling the “backup disaster” story to an acquaintance and I decided to check and make sure everything is a-ok.  Much to my chagrin, it isn’t a-ok.  About two weeks ago backups stopped running! My WHS can’t seem to see all of the clients even though they are all on the same sub-net.  Every computer on the backup list is greyed out like it is offline.

I am having a real hard time finding any information online to help me sort this out and it is driving me crazy.  As best I can tell the first problem started when I switched from Time-Warner Cable Internet to AT&T Uverse.  I am not sure why this would matter since all of the PCs are still behind a router but I can’t think of anything else.  I also installed the McAfee anti-virus that comes on the HP WHS – maybe that has something to do with it as I had not installed it originally when I set it up.

I am running out of ideas – I really don’t want to reinitialize the whole thing again as I have a lot of data on the shared drives that I’d have to “park” somewhere until it was set up again.