Andy Dawson's Blog

Those of you who know me or Rik will know that we’re both very keen on Windows Home Server. I’ve seen some time related issues with my Home Server recently, with message in the event log telling me that the time of the system (which seems to drift more than I’d like) could not be updated due to a variety of issues.

Running a manual resync of the server time (open a command prompt and type w32tm /resync) gave the following error:

Sending resync command to local computer
The computer did not resync because the required time change was too big.

I was a little confused by this, as the drift was only a minute or so from what the other PCs in the house were showing. Checking the time synchronisation configuration on the server (open a command prompt and type w32tm /query /configuration) didn’t show any particular surprises except that the MaxNegPhaseCorrection and MaxPosPhaseCorrection were both set to 3600 (one hour) rather than the more normal 54000 (15 hours), however checking the time zone of the machine did; the server was configured to use PST! I could have sworn that I’d updated the time zone when I built the server, but obviously not…

Changing the time zone of the server sorted out the correct time, however running a synchronisation from the command prompt still gave an error:

Sending resync command to local computer
The computer did not resync because no time data was available.

There are a number of other switches that can be used with the w32tm command, one of which is /rediscover, which redetects the network configuration and rediscovers network sources. With the addition of this flag to the command (w32tm /resync /rediscover) gave me a successful time synchronisation:

Sending resync command to local computer
The command completed successfully.

My Home Server is now running on the correct time!

I recently saw some disk related errors on my Windows Home Server. Following the usual course of action, which is to check the disks using the folowing batch file:

net stop pdl
net stop whsbackup
chkdsk D: /x /r 
chkdsk C: /x /r
for /d %%1 in (C:\fs\*) do start chkdsk /x /r %%1

all seemed fine. Only minor disk problems were encountered (half a dozen unindexed files were indexed) on one disk.

Following a reboot at the end of the process however, I could not connect to the Home Server console. When I logged onto the server, I immediately saw a notice that one or more services had failed to start (never a good thing) and when I tried to start the console the message I received was

"The Windows Home ServerConsole cannot start because the Windows Home Server Storage Manager Service is not running. Please restart Windows Home Server. If the problem persists contact Product Support"

Following a reboot nothing had changed, I saw the same services related error and could not start the Home Server console.

I had a quick look at the services which had failed to start and could see quite a few Home Server related services which should have started, but hadn't. Working from the Windows Home Server Storage Manager service, I could see that of all of the dependencies, the only service which hadn't started was the Volume Shadow Copy service. This service was set to manual, but trying to start the service manually gave a 'the service did not respond in a timely fashion' error after only a second or so and I suspected that this was the root cause of the issue.

A search on the internet resulted in a few suggestions for patches to fix the issue. Trying KB826936 didn't help; the patch was rolled into one of the service packs that I already had installed. KB940349 however installed fine and following a reboot everything fired back into life!

I have an HP ML115 G5 acting as a Home Server which started showing disk related issues as the disks approached being full. Following a tip from Rik, I updated the BIOS to the latest version available from the HP site. While this seems to have fixed the disk related issues, updating the BIOS seemed to cause some BMC related issues; the fans in the system would spin up to full speed when the system was started, but then instead of returning to their normal whisper quiet speed for normal operation, they stayed running at full speed even after the OS had booted.

Following a bit of research, it appears that even if the lights-out 100 remote management card is not installed in the ML100 series servers, the firmware for the card actually runs on the system board and hence needs an update as well. Installing the latest version of the management firmware available on the HP site fixed the fan speed issue and my Home Server has returned to its normal unobtrusive self.

It seems a little odd that HP doesn’t mention that the firmware update is needed at the same time as the BIOS update, I’m sure that it would save a lot of support calls if they mentioned it!