Hard Drive Light Stays On Vista' title='Hard Drive Light Stays On Vista' />Toms Guide Forum Android Smartphones GALAXY 7, SCREEN WENT BLACK, BLUE LIGHT BLINKING. BUTTONS AND SCREEN STILL FUNCTION BUT SCREEN IS COMPLETELY blank. Using Advanced Format Hard Drives With Windows Home Server Media. Smart. Server. net. The following is a guest article written by forum member Tech. Vet aka James. Thanks to James for sharing his experience with the Windows Home Server Community. Hard Drive Light Stays On Vista' title='Hard Drive Light Stays On Vista' />These are some spacecraft designs that are based on reality. So they appear quite outlandish and undramatic looking. Return Castle Wolfenstein Cheats Windows Vista on this page. In the next page will appear designs that are. How to dual boot Linux and Windows Step by step installation instructions. If you want a PC where you can use both Linux and Windows, a dual boot PC using one hard. Ive been using 2 x 2. GB WD EARS drive on my EX495 for over a year and have had no problems. The first time I did it, I had 1 drive as the OS and ran alignment. Free Download Toolwiz Care 4. A set of tools designed to speed up your PC, fix systems issues, clean up invalid registry entries and dele. Hard Drive Light Stays On Vista' title='Hard Drive Light Stays On Vista' />This past weekend I got my new HP X5. Western Digital Caviar Green EARS drives and I wanted to document some key learnings I took away from the process. Before I get too far along, it is probably a good idea to take a moment to talk about hard drives and to point out that these days hard drives seem to come with a mix of attributes, two of which are very pertinent to Windows Home Server v. The first attribute concerns power consumption. Hard drives consume power and lately drive manufacturers have produced lines of regular power drives and low power aka Green drives. The green drives offer real advantages in terms of power savings and cooler operating temperatures, both things that WHS users tend to appreciate since our servers are often running 2. However, all of these green features arent necessarily ideal for running in a server environment see Step 1 below for an example. The other attribute that seems to be becoming more of an issue is whether or not the drive is an Advanced Format drive. Traditionally hard drives have come with a data sector size of 5. Kbytes sector size. This isnt much of a problem aside from the fact that older operating systems dont handle 4. K sectors drives very well. Actually, they have no problems reading the data, but they dont always write it to the drive in the efficient manner that 4. K drives depend on. The problem is rooted in the way an older OS formats the drive and begins laying down data. It appears that the older OSs format and start writing the data at a one sector offset of the ideal setting for the 4. K drives.   Once the drive is initialized, all of the data ends up being one sector off of the ideal setting. Reports indicate that without intervention, 4. K sector drives formatted with an older OS will often slow down in terms of access times and there have been reports that data tends to get corrupted as a result. This entire discussion would be academic if it werent for the fact that WHS v. Server 2. 00. 3, which as hard luck would have it is one of the older OSs that dont play well with 4. K sector drives.  This is going to become a huge factor moving forward because 4. K Advanced Format drives are proliferating as manufacturers move production over to these more efficient units. I even read some commentary that in the near future all hard drives will be of the advanced format variety. For the time being it is a challenge determining whether or not a particular drive is of the advanced format variety. So until WHS v. K drives comes out, the WHS v. Editors Note Microsoft has a KB Article recommending against using Advanced Format Drives with Windows Home Server, however as the author demonstrates, with the proper setup many people have had success using them. Enough preamble, on to my project. The process went smoothly, albeit with some trial and error. Here is the step by step process I took putting in a 1. TB EARS System Drive, and two 2. TB EARS Pool Drives. The first step is to deactivate the Intelli. Park Feature on the WD Drives. This is one of those green features that dont necessarily play well in the server environment. It looks like ALL of Western Digitals Green Drives now ship with this feature enabled and by default have the timer set to a ridiculously short 8 seconds. What this means is that after 8 seconds of drive inactivity, the heads unload and park. The rationale for this is to gain aerodynamic efficiency inside the drive that results in what I presume to be a minuscule power savings. The heads come out of park position as soon as drive activity is called for. The parkingunparking is also referred to as loadingunloading and a full cycle occurs each time the process happens. These cycles are counted on a LCC counter in the drive firmware. Hard drives come out of the factory with a rating for LCCs and the WD drives are rated for 3. If the cycles accrue above this range, then in theory the chances of drive failure begin to creep up. In addition the drive manufacturer may reject a warranty claim for drives with excessive LCCs. The problem is that if you have disk activity say every 1. LoadUnload cycle, increasing the Load Cycle Count each time they do. If cumulatively the heads go through 5 1. LCCs per day then it is no big deal because the count increases slowly. But if the heads cycle 4 5 times or more per hour, then the equation changes rapidly. There are reports of WD Green Drives in a WHS box that have seen the LCC number shoot up to 1. It seems that system drives typically have enough constant activity that they rarely seem to park, even at the default setting of 8 seconds. On the other hand, pool drives have much less activity so they tend to park the heads quite a bit, especially with the 8 second setting. Fortunately WD makes a utility called wdidle. Intelli. Park timer. The only problem is that you have to run it off a cleanly booted machine using DOS. Most of us have long ago given up DOS for Windows and Id bet that many current Windows users have never even seen a DOS based computer running. Finding a way to boot a modern PC off of DOS is a challenge, but fortunately some kind folks have burned a DOS boot image containing the wdidle. CD iso file.  It can be downloaded here. I think the origins of this project come from the Ti. Vo community who have similar issues with WD Green Drives in their DVRs. Note that the version of wdidle. WD site is v. 1. 0. Im not sure the version matters as v. Also, WD has not updated their site to reflect that the program works with most of their green drives including the EARS. The process I followed involved downloading the iso file, burning to a CD, then booting up the machine with nothing but the WD Green drive attached to the SATA controller. Do not boot up with any other drive attached. Once the DOS command prompt was up, I ran the wdidle. The wdidle. 3. exe program is simple and only has a few command line options. Running wdidle. ID and timer settings usually the default value of 8 seconds as will wdidle. R.   Running wdidle. D is supposed to disable the timer, but in reality resets it to the maximum timeout of about 6. With that setting, even pool drives have enough activity to avoid parking the heads, the net result being that the LCC numbers stay much more manageable. I found it best to attach the drive, turn onboot the PC, make the changes, then shut down the PC between drive swaps. The entire process for all three drives took me less than 5 minutes. Im sorry, but since the wdidle. DOS based I dont have any screenshots to offer. The next step is to insert an EARS drive in drive bay 1 system drive slot and do a factory reset procedure. This will partition and format the drive, then will install the WHS operating system. Note that factory resets can be fickle so follow the instructions and do a search of the forums if you are having trouble. Remember to connect the restoring PC directly to the server and deactivate ALL wireless adapters on the PC as well as the antivirus programs. Both will interfere with the PC being able to communicate with your server for the restore process. HP Touch. Pad Needs 6 to 8 Weeks for Additional Shipments. Hewlett Packard will apparently need close to two months to start fulfilling backorders for the temporarily revived Touch. Pad tablet. It will take 6 8 weeks to build enough HP Touch. Pads to meet our current commitments, during which time your order will then ship from this stock with free ground shipping, read an email sent to customers and reprinted in a Sept. Precentral. net blog. You will receive a shipping notification with a tracking number once your order has shipped. That would place the new Touch. Pads in consumers hands sometime in either late October or early November. The reduced price devices are not returnable, according to the email. HP originally acquired web. OS as part of its takeover of Palm in 2. The manufacturer originally had big plans for loading the operating system onto a variety of devices, including tablets, smartphones, desktops and laptops. However, sales of its Touch. Pad proved anemic, and HP made the decision to end the tablets life after a mere six weeks on the market. In order to clear out inventory, the manufacturer sliced the starting price to 9. In the wake of that, HP made the decision to revive the line for a limited time. In addition, HP plans on dividing its web. OS arm into two separate units reporting to different areas of the company, according to two leaked memos that have made their way onto the Web. The web. OS software assets will find their way into the arms, however welcoming, of its Office of Strategy and Technology. The other parts of the web. OS corporate infrastructure, presumably including its hardware interests, will continue as part of the Personal Systems Group, which manufactures HPs PCs, and which will presumably be spun off into its own entity under the terms of the companys new strategy. We have decided that well be most effective in these efforts by having the teams in web. OS software engineering, worldwide developer relations and web. OS software product marketing join the Office of Strategy and Technology, Todd Bradley, executive vice president of HPs Personal Systems Group, wrote in an email circulated to the web. OS developer team and also leaked onto Precentral. The remainder of the web. OS team, under Stephen De. Witt, will continue to report into PSG. According to at least one analyst, flooding the market with additional Touch. Pad devices could have significant benefits for HP going forward. A larger installed base of Touch. Pad and web. OS devices should increase the value of web. OS in a potential sale, Sterne Agee analyst Shaw Wu wrote in a research note widely circulated on Barrons and other financial Websites. We believe logical buyers may include Samsung Electronics, Research In Motion, HTC, Amazon. Facebook, Sony, Microsoft and others. Follow Nicholas Kolakowski on Twitter.