So my home server has been running now for almost a week (sort of). On Saturday the power went out in my basement and all my machines were shut off. When I flipped the breaker everything started coming back up and online, except for my new server. I talked to technical support via their email and eventually via phone and all was useless. However, eventually I WAS able to get it back online.
The problem was that the machine SEEMED as though it were booting like normal, but it would never finalize and connect to the network (allowing me to connect to it with WHS Connector). The blue power light would come on, the blue hard drive status lights would flicker for a while, and then the hard drive status light would stop and the .i. status indicator would repeatedly flash (and never stop). The hard drive lights that indicate WHS has loaded the drives into the WHS pool would never come and the network lights would never come on either.
What I found was that you shouldn.t try to talk to Acer technical support unless you are ready to RMA your device. Most of the support staff (at least ALL of the staff that I spoke to at least) were not English-primary speakers so I found that I had to repeat myself quite often and sentences as like .There is no keyboard, mouse or monitor ports to connect to, so I can.t check my bios. were followed up by .So this is a laptop?.. Very frustrating. On top of THAT, Acer doesn.t seem to have an official support forum in the database for this product (yet?) so there is no way to classify my problems with the appropriate device type. I had to place it in the .Aspire Desktop. category because there IS NO Aspire easyStore category.
After about 30 emails back and forth with Acer technical support and then calling them, I was told to backup my files to another computer and do a factory reset of the OS and hard drive. This lead me down the path of having to pull the hard drive out and place it in my personal desktop machine. As soon as I booted up the machine it started performing a scan disk on the additional (new) hard drive. Within about 3 minutes it found a great number of errors and fixed them all. So, I thought for S**TS and giggles I would put the hard drive back in the WHS machine and see if the fixed hard disk errors would solve the problem and sure enough, IT DID! Within five minutes the machine was back up and online, connected to the network and both hard drives in the pool.
The next step for me lied in checking out online storage/backup. After doing a quick search I came across a number of different possibilities. Most of the ones I found would end up costing me about $40/mo except for one, called Jungle Disk (http://www.jungledisk.com/). Jungle Disk seems to just be a company that is creating some software that integrates with WHS (Windows Home Server) and the Amazon Web Services. What.s nice is that Jungle Disk.s WHS add-in is free of charge, so the only cost is Amazon. After looking over their pricing sheet I figured that it would cost me about $5-10 a month to backup my 40 gigs of data.
After signing up for Amazon.s Web Services and downloading/installing the Jungle Disk WHS add-in I got right to backing up my files online. What a beautiful thing. 🙂