My WHS (windows home server, v1, not the new 2011 version) box died yesterday. It's been running flawlessly for ages, and now it won't boot.
System is an ECS SLIT-A 570-based system, core2duo, 3gb ram, and a crapton of drives. 4 SATA from the mobo, 2 SATA off a controller card, and 2 external USB drives. Total space is around 10tb.
Anyway, it'd start to boot and freeze either at the windows splash screen or a plain black screen just after that. Safe mode did the same, except it said safe mode in the corners when it froze.
Booted off a ultimatebootcd4win disc. It froze up too while loading.
So then I booted off that again, but picked the memtest86 option. Ran that and IT froze partway through. Now suspecting bad ram, I pulled all but 1 stick and tried memtest again. Passed with no errors. In fact, ALL 4 sticks passed individually.
Next put in just 1 stick and booted. It went all the way into WHS desktop this time, but with an error that a device or service had failed and to check the event log. When I did, there's a TON (50+) entries for disk errors on the OS drive of the system. Some said drive errors, some said controller error.
Told it to run the full chkdsk on the C and D drives [those are partitions of the primary physical disc] and rebooted. That took a while, but said no errors found. Booted up WHS again, and the same error is back. Turns out it's adding another drive error to the log every 10-20 seconds or so.
So, what do you think is dying here? SATA controller on the motherboard? the HD? RAM? I'm sorta suspecting the drive is fine, since memtest and the boot CD both froze up too. Given that, I doubt that a fresh OS drive and fresh install of WHS would help any.
Got anything else I should try? Wife's not happy not being able to access her shows (we use a HTPC for all our tv watching, and the video is stored on the WHS...)
System is an ECS SLIT-A 570-based system, core2duo, 3gb ram, and a crapton of drives. 4 SATA from the mobo, 2 SATA off a controller card, and 2 external USB drives. Total space is around 10tb.
Anyway, it'd start to boot and freeze either at the windows splash screen or a plain black screen just after that. Safe mode did the same, except it said safe mode in the corners when it froze.
Booted off a ultimatebootcd4win disc. It froze up too while loading.
So then I booted off that again, but picked the memtest86 option. Ran that and IT froze partway through. Now suspecting bad ram, I pulled all but 1 stick and tried memtest again. Passed with no errors. In fact, ALL 4 sticks passed individually.
Next put in just 1 stick and booted. It went all the way into WHS desktop this time, but with an error that a device or service had failed and to check the event log. When I did, there's a TON (50+) entries for disk errors on the OS drive of the system. Some said drive errors, some said controller error.
Told it to run the full chkdsk on the C and D drives [those are partitions of the primary physical disc] and rebooted. That took a while, but said no errors found. Booted up WHS again, and the same error is back. Turns out it's adding another drive error to the log every 10-20 seconds or so.
So, what do you think is dying here? SATA controller on the motherboard? the HD? RAM? I'm sorta suspecting the drive is fine, since memtest and the boot CD both froze up too. Given that, I doubt that a fresh OS drive and fresh install of WHS would help any.
Got anything else I should try? Wife's not happy not being able to access her shows (we use a HTPC for all our tv watching, and the video is stored on the WHS...)