About a week ago we had an issue with a HP X1600 G2 Network Storage System Server. After rebooting we got an error message in the event log roughly ever minute with Event ID 7031

The HP Automated Storage Manager Server service terminated unexpectedly. It has done this 1 time(s).  The following corrective action will be taken in 0 milliseconds: Restart the service.

followed by an informational log with Event ID 7036

The HP Automated Storage Manager Server service entered the running state.

and it kept looping through those two messages.

After some digging around we worked out that it was a USB hard drive causing the error. The hard drive had been plugged in for almost a month but it seems the version of HP Automated Storage Manager we were running couldn't start if there was a USB hard drive attached. Attaching the drive after the service has started doesn't cause issues which is why the error didn't crop up until after we rebooted the server.

Hopefully that helps someone else who is scratching their head trying to work out this issue.