- Sep 27, 2012
- 8,890
- 1
- 34,965
Hi guys, it's been a while. I could really use your help with this one, though - I feel like the water is right about up at my head.
About one month ago, the breaker to my house was flipped (by a third party). Two computers were running at the time, and while "my" computer had absolutely zero issues, my HTPC / server wasn't so lucky.
After some troubleshooting, I determined that one of the four 4TB WD Red drives was faulty, and returned it for an RMA. These drives are being used in a Windows Storage Spaces pool, set up as the equivalent of RAID 5.
After I replaced that drive, the pool was rebuilt, optimized, and seemed to function normally. Fast forward to three days ago, when I go to reinstall Windows. (Windows 10 Home x64.) At first, right after the install, everything worked fine. Then, however, I went to gain permissions to all the files in the Storage Spaces pool using the "Take Ownership" script.
It didn't like that. Since then, the computer (and any other computer with these four drives in it) takes about half an hour to boot into windows.
Once in Windows, the Storage Spaces pool reports itself as "offline due to a critical write failure, please add drives," and when I try to bring it online, Explorer freezes and eventually crashes. (And I can't bring it back using the task manager.)
Between the slow startup and the issues with Storage Spaces, I have a bad drive, right?
Except that, individually when plugged into a dock on my other computer, each drive reports its S.M.A.R.T. data as being totally healthy.
Well, after talking to Western Digital, they wanted me to run their Data Lifeguard Diagnostics program on each drive, in the original system.
I run the quick test on the first drive, and it passes, no problem. I go to run the extended test, and it says it'll take six hours.
Six hours later, I get up to take a screenshot of the results, and to start it on the next drive. It claims that the extended test was a pass - great! I open snipping tool, to save the results, but before I can press 'new,' the entire screen gets covered in a checkerboard of small translucent squares. Unfortunately, before I can grab my phone and take a picture, the system crashes and then tries to start POST again.
So... That's a graphics card failure, right?
Only I've also been having issues with the motherboard - it's occasionally giving me an error where it loses the system date and time, and worse, occasionally gives an error claiming that a CPU change was detected, and to press y to continue. These problems were not resolved by flashing to the latest bios revision.
So... It feels like everything is crumbling around me. I can't afford to replace this computer right now, and I can't afford to pay a data recovery specialist to save the 7.8 TB of files that I had on this server.
Specs are as follows:
Windows build 1803
Pentium g4400
Asrock Rack C236 WSI Mini ITX Server Motherboard
16GB of Kingston ValueRAM 2133MHz DDR4 ECC (unbuffered) Server Memory
Nvidia Gtx 750ti
Toshiba OCZ TR150 2.5" SSD
4x Western Digital Red 4TB HDDs
Thank you so much for your time and any direction I should proceed with troubleshooting.
About one month ago, the breaker to my house was flipped (by a third party). Two computers were running at the time, and while "my" computer had absolutely zero issues, my HTPC / server wasn't so lucky.
After some troubleshooting, I determined that one of the four 4TB WD Red drives was faulty, and returned it for an RMA. These drives are being used in a Windows Storage Spaces pool, set up as the equivalent of RAID 5.
After I replaced that drive, the pool was rebuilt, optimized, and seemed to function normally. Fast forward to three days ago, when I go to reinstall Windows. (Windows 10 Home x64.) At first, right after the install, everything worked fine. Then, however, I went to gain permissions to all the files in the Storage Spaces pool using the "Take Ownership" script.
It didn't like that. Since then, the computer (and any other computer with these four drives in it) takes about half an hour to boot into windows.
Once in Windows, the Storage Spaces pool reports itself as "offline due to a critical write failure, please add drives," and when I try to bring it online, Explorer freezes and eventually crashes. (And I can't bring it back using the task manager.)
Between the slow startup and the issues with Storage Spaces, I have a bad drive, right?
Except that, individually when plugged into a dock on my other computer, each drive reports its S.M.A.R.T. data as being totally healthy.
Well, after talking to Western Digital, they wanted me to run their Data Lifeguard Diagnostics program on each drive, in the original system.
I run the quick test on the first drive, and it passes, no problem. I go to run the extended test, and it says it'll take six hours.
Six hours later, I get up to take a screenshot of the results, and to start it on the next drive. It claims that the extended test was a pass - great! I open snipping tool, to save the results, but before I can press 'new,' the entire screen gets covered in a checkerboard of small translucent squares. Unfortunately, before I can grab my phone and take a picture, the system crashes and then tries to start POST again.
So... That's a graphics card failure, right?
Only I've also been having issues with the motherboard - it's occasionally giving me an error where it loses the system date and time, and worse, occasionally gives an error claiming that a CPU change was detected, and to press y to continue. These problems were not resolved by flashing to the latest bios revision.
So... It feels like everything is crumbling around me. I can't afford to replace this computer right now, and I can't afford to pay a data recovery specialist to save the 7.8 TB of files that I had on this server.
Specs are as follows:
Windows build 1803
Pentium g4400
Asrock Rack C236 WSI Mini ITX Server Motherboard
16GB of Kingston ValueRAM 2133MHz DDR4 ECC (unbuffered) Server Memory
Nvidia Gtx 750ti
Toshiba OCZ TR150 2.5" SSD
4x Western Digital Red 4TB HDDs
Thank you so much for your time and any direction I should proceed with troubleshooting.
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