HP MediaSmart LX195 Server Recovery

I’m preparing to sell a LX195 that is no longer needed. I put in a blank hard drive and tried to do a server recovery so I could get to the Factory Reset option. But it kept failing during step 3 of 4. I’m using a Windows 7 Ultimate laptop to host the restore.

Things I Tried

  • Directly connect the patch cable between the PC and the LX195.
  • Turn off the firewall on the PC (all profiles).
  • Turn off anti-virus (Microsoft Security Essentials active protection).
  • As suggested here, set the PC to a fixed IP of 169.37.37.42.
  • As suggested here, attach the new drive to a PC, then pre-format it as a single NTFS partition with default partition size. Make it the Active partition.
  • As suggested here, copy the recovery DVD to my hard drive and substitute v4.00 of tftpd32, downloaded here.

No matter what I did, as I watched the TFTP tab of tftpd32, I could see the transfer of the first large file, BOOT.WIM, get hung anywhere between 45% and 60%. In the log window, I would see two occurrences of a message like this:

Ack block nnnnn ignored (received twice)

after which the transfer was hung.

Finally I fired up Wireshark to watch the packets during the transfer. I noticed that at about the time of the failure, there were some strange packets going out from the PC on high port numbers—I think it may have been the Server 2012 Essentials agent trying to find the Server 2012 machine.

The Solution

Rather than try to figure out which services to stop to stop the Essentials traffic, I just rebooted into Safe Mode and ran the recovery again. Voila, BOOT.WIM downloaded successfully the first time, I finally got through to the Server Recovery/Factory Reset prompt, and the factory reset completed within a few minutes.

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