networking - Windows Home Server loses network

networking windows-home-server

06
2013-12

Bill

I have a Windows Home Server running on my home network and I lose the ability to connect to it on a regular basis. Sometime sit will stay connected for hours and lately the longest it has stayed reachable has been 5 days. This server is a fairly vanilla installation on an Acer Aspire easyStore Home Server. The only other software that is run is the Logitech Media Server.

When this condition happens, the box looks normal, the disk lights flicker occasionally, the netowkr light flickers, and the "I" is red indicating a problem. The only way to connect to the home server again is to turn it off and back on. When the server reboots everything is functional until it happens again.

I have read many many forumn posts about this condition and many have some "cure" that worked for other people which has not solved the problem here. Many people have this problem using Windows Home Server and many different hardware platforms, and many different brands of nics. One resourceful network admin added a second Intel nic to there Windows Home Server and both interfaces would go down, ususally within a coupe of minutes of each other.

Glad to provide any other information.

Answers

Bill

This problem turned out to be the system disk going bad. Cloned the system disk to a new disk, set the disk ID to be the same as the old disk, followed some other steps which you can find by googling "replace Windows Home Server system disk", and the system is back to being solid. No problems now for four months. It is very hard to find out from the headless system that the disk is the problem. I yanked the disk and put it into a system with video and the first screen had a message that lead me to the solution. It would have saved me many months of trying various solutions had the message been available when logging in to the system console.

Related Question

freeze - Windows Home Server Hangs on Restart (HP Mediasmart EX485)

Colin Dabritz

I have an HP Mediasmart EX485 Windows Home Server, and I will sometimes find it stuck in the morning with a blinking blue server light. (Power is solid, network is off, server is blinking). Some investigation suggested that it is hanging on a reboot. Hard power cycling the unit recovers it.

This is problematic as I use the unit remotely, and having it take itself offline from time to time renders it useless until I can get back home and power cycle it.

Symptoms:

The only external symptom is that is appears to hang with blinking server light after rebooting some of the time.
The event logs on the system show it shutting down after updates at around 2AM, and then nothing until I rebooted it at 7:40 PM. None of the error are very suggestive about any kind of problem.

I called HP support and we worked through he following with no success:

Disabling the "Enhanced Security Configuration" windows component (re-enabled after)
Downloading the executable for the HP 2.5.10.27311 patch and running it (Rolled back to 2.1, updated forward to patch, no change)

After doing some research I tried this:

Installed Windows Script 5.7 (Worked, no change)

I did further research but nothing interesting really came up. One theory I had was a hanging update, although both windows update and HP updates are currently empty, no new update. After the latest issue windows did pop up the 'recent updates' message and such. Nothing really clear about that. I believe it has happened on 'clean' reboots as well, but it doesn't get rebooted often, so I am not sure. Either way it is a problem.

Does anyone have futher leads or suggestions? I can do any testing or answer any questions if needed. This is a very big problem me, and I would greatly appreciate any help.