Windows home server FREEZING

matthewhotdude

matthewhotdude

matthewhotdude

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Fractal Design Define XL Full Tower Case - Titanium Grey

Icy Box IB-555SSK 5-Bay SATASAS Hard Drive Backplane

Gigabyte GA-EP45T-UD3LR Intel P45 (Socket 775) PCI-Express DDR3 Motherboard

Patriot Viper 2 Sector 5 4GB (2x2GB) PC3-18000C9 2250MHz Dual Channel Memory Kit

Antec TruePower New Modular 550W Power Supply - With FREE 3D Mark 2011 Advance

Lian Li IB-01B PCI-Express 5-Port SATA-II & 1-Port e-SATA RAID Controller

Samsung SpinPoint F4 EcoGreen 2TB SATA-II 32MB Cache - OEM (HD204UI)

Intel Pentium Dual-Core E6700 "LGA775 Core 2" 3.20GHz (1066FSB) - Retail

Asus GeForce 8400GS 512MB DDR2 Low Profile PCI-Express Graphics Card

LG GH22NS50 22x DVD±RW SATA ReWriter (Black) - Retail


Only built the thing 3 days ago, and everyday , only once a day each time between 8pm- 11 pm the thing will completly freeze up, time stops no mouse movement, nothing, nothing in the even viewer to suggest anything....any ideas....the whole system seems completly nuts like the cd drive randomly ejecting itself :confused:

But when it's actually up and running it runs perfectly
 
A few scattergun suggestions that might help.

I'd try running an extended memtest for starters and have a look at windows event logs as they are easy things to try first. If you watch the cpu usage in task manager, do you get any periodic 100%s/0%s if you create any heavy disk I/O (might point to using process monitor)?

Are you sure you installed the right drivers for WHS? It's based on server 2003, so XP drivers should be OK. Tried IDE instead of AHCI mode?

If I was going to guess on one thing that might cause grief, it would probably be the SATA RAID card. Are you using it in RAID mode (WHS isn't really intended to run with RAID) or as individual standard ports?

You may have go back to a minimal setup and reinstall before adding hardware and loading drivers to find the point that makes it break.

Hope you get it sorted.
 
wonko said:
A few scattergun suggestions that might help.

I'd try running an extended memtest for starters and have a look at windows event logs as they are easy things to try first. If you watch the cpu usage in task manager, do you get any periodic 100%s/0%s if you create any heavy disk I/O (might point to using process monitor)?

Are you sure you installed the right drivers for WHS? It's based on server 2003, so XP drivers should be OK. Tried IDE instead of AHCI mode?

If I was going to guess on one thing that might cause grief, it would probably be the SATA RAID card. Are you using it in RAID mode (WHS isn't really intended to run with RAID) or as individual standard ports?

You may have go back to a minimal setup and reinstall before adding hardware and loading drivers to find the point that makes it break.

Hope you get it sorted.
Click to expand...


Whats AHCI mode,

The raid card is only being used for the ports, the drives are not raided
 
I can see one set of parts on your list that I had on my system which caused exactly the same situation as you're experiencing .. the Samsung F4 drives. Although they should work perfectly as they're 4K drives but with emulation to 512bytes, for some reason on my system WHS hated them and would keep spitting them out of the system when the "demigrator.exe" service kicked off between 8-11pm every single night.

I bought six of them to add into my WHS however every single one would cause the system to randomly freeze with no response from keyboard/mouse or another system trying to access via shares or remote desktop.

Eventually after trying all six I RMA'd them back to the supplier I'd bought them from and got the F3 drives instead which have been working perfectly ever since.

Sorry to being the bearer of bad news and hope you get it sorted
 
Praetorian said:
I can see one set of parts on your list that I had on my system which caused exactly the same situation as you're experiencing .. the Samsung F4 drives. Although they should work perfectly as they're 4K drives but with emulation to 512bytes, for some reason on my system WHS hated them and would keep spitting them out of the system when the "demigrator.exe" service kicked off between 8-11pm every single night.

I bought six of them to add into my WHS however every single one would cause the system to randomly freeze with no response from keyboard/mouse or another system trying to access via shares or remote desktop.

Eventually after trying all six I RMA'd them back to the supplier I'd bought them from and got the F3 drives instead which have been working perfectly ever since.

Sorry to being the bearer of bad news and hope you get it sorted
Click to expand...


Great.....thats the times when mine normally plays up!

have tried the memtest and passed with no problems
 
wonko said:
A few scattergun suggestions that might help.

I'd try running an extended memtest for starters and have a look at windows event logs as they are easy things to try first. If you watch the cpu usage in task manager, do you get any periodic 100%s/0%s if you create any heavy disk I/O (might point to using process monitor)?

Are you sure you installed the right drivers for WHS? It's based on server 2003, so XP drivers should be OK. Tried IDE instead of AHCI mode?

If I was going to guess on one thing that might cause grief, it would probably be the SATA RAID card. Are you using it in RAID mode (WHS isn't really intended to run with RAID) or as individual standard ports?

You may have go back to a minimal setup and reinstall before adding hardware and loading drivers to find the point that makes it break.

Hope you get it sorted.
Click to expand...

just checked it was already in IDE, could changing it to AHCI help?
 
matthewhotdude said:
just checked it was already in IDE, could changing it to AHCI help?
Click to expand...
I wouldn't have thought so TBH - I was guessing that it was disk related in some way and being provoked by high i/o. Praeotrian's suggestion about demigrator sounds more than plausible - I've never really noticed what time it runs.

Out of interest, how many F4 disks have you got, and are they on your motherboard's SATA ports or via the PCI-E card?
 
wonko said:
I wouldn't have thought so TBH - I was guessing that it was disk related in some way and being provoked by high i/o. Praeotrian's suggestion about demigrator sounds more than plausible - I've never really noticed what time it runs.

Out of interest, how many F4 disks have you got, and are they on your motherboard's SATA ports or via the PCI-E card?
Click to expand...

Well I disabled demigrator, and it still froze, It managed 20 hours uptime this time before it froze,

I have 2 F4's ones new and ones from my old HP Media smart server which was also running WHS, and that had no problem with the F4,

5 of my hard drives are connected to the PCI card and one to my motherboard, the OS drive is conneted to the motherboard

Could this be a memory voltage problem, ive noticed my motherboard has it set at 1.5V and it should be 1.65V


I really wish I could figure this one out :(
 
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Have you investigated the "F4EG.exe" patch from Samsung?

There is a bug in the F4 firmware that was related to data corruption but I don't know if it in anyway relates to your problem.

I think the patch can be applied without data loss.

It might be worth a look before you go crazy!

These 2TB F4 drives have been causing a few problems in NAS boxes as well, I think related to their relatively slow spin up time in addition to the data corruption firmware problem. Maybe you could have a look at the power management settings and see if the drives are set to power down and if so set them to always spin just as a test.
 
If the patch is the one I've heard of it relates to a specific condition where the disk is bombarded with SMART status queries, so very unlikely to be the cause of any problem in practice.

Is this now your live server, or is it still in 'test mode' where you can muck around and reinstall without worrying about the data on it?

If you've got 2 F4, but 6 HDDs, what are the other ones? Any other software you've loaded, or other hardware not mentioned?

Have you been able to try putting all of the disks on the motherboard ports and pull the pci-e card? Were there any clues in task manager or event log?

If you're using an F4 as the system disk, then I'm not sure whether the non-4K aligned data partition would cause a performance issue (can't see why it could cause a lockup though).
 
wonko said:
If the patch is the one I've heard of it relates to a specific condition where the disk is bombarded with SMART status queries, so very unlikely to be the cause of any problem in practice.

Is this now your live server, or is it still in 'test mode' where you can muck around and reinstall without worrying about the data on it?

If you've got 2 F4, but 6 HDDs, what are the other ones? Any other software you've loaded, or other hardware not mentioned?

Have you been able to try putting all of the disks on the motherboard ports and pull the pci-e card? Were there any clues in task manager or event log?

If you're using an F4 as the system disk, then I'm not sure whether the non-4K aligned data partition would cause a performance issue (can't see why it could cause a lockup though).
Click to expand...

What I'm trying now is, I have unplugged both F4's and leaving the server on to see if I still get the problem,

This is my live server now with over 4 TB of data on it, Ive not really loaded any software, well nothing new that wasnt on my previous server, Have checked the event logs and nothing!

Oh and the F4 is not the system disk, I'm really frustrated at the moment, spent £700 on this and it's worst than my old delapadated Hp media smart
 
If you've run an extended memtest without any problem then I'd have thought it was unlikely.
Any chance of getting your old server back in action for a bit so you can take this one 'back to basics'?
Did you manage to look in task manager for any unusual behaviour (odd peaks or dips in cpu usage, any processes using excessive memory or cpu, etc.)? Worth doing both with idle and with heavy reading/writing to the disks. When reading and writing to the server, is the network card traffic steady or stop-start?

Edit: just saw your separate post about only being able to write to the server at about 3Mb/s - this sounds like a relevant symptom!
 
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wonko said:
If you've run an extended memtest without any problem then I'd have thought it was unlikely.
Any chance of getting your old server back in action for a bit so you can take this one 'back to basics'?
Did you manage to look in task manager for any unusual behaviour (odd peaks or dips in cpu usage, any processes using excessive memory or cpu, etc.)? Worth doing both with idle and with heavy reading/writing to the disks. When reading and writing to the server, is the network card traffic steady or stop-start?

Edit: just saw your separate post about only being able to write to the server at about 3Mb/s - this sounds like a relevant symptom!
Click to expand...

Check out my other thread, I had another problem before this one

http://forums.overclockers.co.uk/showthread.php?t=18247549

changing the ram voltage seems to have solved that one, so hopefully it's linked to this problem....hopefully anyway....as for the network problem, I have done some tweeking with jumbo frames and am now able to send data at 55 mb/s
 
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