Recovering data from HP Mediasmart Server EX 490

[ArielRogson]

I own an HP Mediasmart Server EX 490, and for years it has been a reliable workhorse.  The server has two hard disk drives in a RAID 1 configuration: I cannot recall if they are 1 or 2 TB drives.  But in the past few days, I have been unable to access my data.  My router shows that the server is on the network, and I can ping the IP address of the server from my computer.  But the server does not show under Network in Windows Explorer, I cannot establish a network drive mapping to the disks, the Windows Home Server Console cannot connect to the server, and I cannot Remote Terminal into the server.

It would seem that there are three possible sources of problem: my computer, my router, or the server.  But swapping out the computer made no difference, and as far as I can tell my router permits all possible LAN traffic (the firewall, as far as I can tell, only manages data that crosses between the LAN and the Internet).  Therefore, the problem seems to be with the server.  Yet all the lights glow aqua, so the server does not see any problems with itself (and since I cannot connect with the Console, I cannot check anything any other way).

Given the age of the server, it seems like a silly idea to try and replace parts to get it working again.  I would be happy to get my data off of the server.  I have backups of most of the data, but I am sure there is some content thas has slipped through the backups, so it would be preferable to copy the data directly off the disks, if possible. To that end, what I want to do (if I can) is pull one of the hard disk drives, put it in an external USB disk drive enclosure, and connect that to my computer to copy the data off the disk.  But will this work?  Will I encounter problems doing this because the disks were configured as RAID 1?  Do I need a particular enclosure to be able to access the data?

Any suggestions on how to make this work would be welcome.

If it matters, my computer is an ASUS ROG G750 series laptop running Windows 10 (upgraded from Windows 8.1 originally), and my router is an ASUS RT-AC68U (fully up-to-date firmware).  I suspect it is merely coincidental, but the problems started just after I had updated the firmware to resolve the KRACK vulnerability.

Thanks in advance!

Ariel