Need help with NAS problem

[coolrunner84]

I currently have an Intel SS4200 NAS system that I have been using as a WHS server for over a year now, and today I came home to find out that it is showing two of the HDD LEDs as solid amber. I then tried to access the server through the WHS console and remote desktop, and neither worked so I just restarted it.

Restarting it did not help either. The two LEDs are still amber and now the fans are running at full rpms.

According to the manual solid amber LED is supposed to indicate a hard disk fault. The strange thing is that I have three hard drives in there at the moment in bays 1, 2, and 4. I had to remove the drive in bay 3 due to the heatsink from the southbridge overheating the drive. The two LEDs that are solid amber are for bays 2 and 3. The LED for bay 1 is not even lighting up.

Anyone familiar with what can be causing this? I think it might be a board or power supply problem. It will be hard to test those since this is not exactly an off the shelf system. I think I might be able to test the power supply, but that won't be until the weekend. So if anyone knows about this problem please post it here or PM me.

I looked through the troubleshooting guide here, but did not find anything that could explain my problem.
http://www.intel.com/p/en_US/support/category/server/ss4200-e/trblsht

 

[coolrunner84]

I have tried replacing the memory and power supply, and neither worked. The next thing I am going to try is to put back the original CPU. I replaced that with an e2140 when I first got it over a year ago.

I am just glad that I kept a full backup server. Does anyone have any suggestions?

 

[sub.mesa]

You could start by posting the SMART data on each affected drive. Connecting the disks directly to a non-RAID controller will allow you to fix them.

Spinrite is a good (but not free) option to correct bad sectors on your disks, which is what u suspect.

 

[coolrunner84]

You could start by posting the SMART data on each affected drive. Connecting the disks directly to a non-RAID controller will allow you to fix them.

Spinrite is a good (but not free) option to correct bad sectors on your disks, which is what u suspect.

All the drives are good. I plugged them into another machine and was able to read from them. I even transferred some files. The problem is that this is a headless system. It only has one pci-e 1x slot in it, so I cant even connect a video card to check what it going on at post. There is a way to read from a serial cable, but I have never tried it and I don't think I even have one.

To me its looks like the motherboard is dead, but there is no way for me to confirm that.

Whatever the outcome is, I will need a new NAS. I will consider ZFSGuru.

Thanks for the reply.

 

[sub.mesa]

In fact, you can use the ZFSguru livecd; it would assign an IP over DHCP and allow you to connect to the web-interface and check the SMART information of the disks on the Disks->SMART page. That way you would not need a video card. You just have to guess the IP address that is assigned.

One problem: your system has to support 64-bit and have at least 800MB of memory.

 

[coolrunner84]

In fact, you can use the ZFSguru livecd; it would assign an IP over DHCP and allow you to connect to the web-interface and check the SMART information of the disks on the Disks->SMART page. That way you would not need a video card. You just have to guess the IP address that is assigned.

One problem: your system has to support 64-bit and have at least 800MB of memory.

Thanks, but the drives are not the problem. I disconnected all of them and tried to power up, and the same LEDs were lighting up. I am going to try and get a serial cable and follow the instructions in the link below to see if I can view the post messages.

http://ss4200.pbworks.com/w/page/5122741/Console-Access-via-RS232