I sometimes wonder why it is I never can have ‘standard’ malfunctions in my computer hardware. It’s as if fate wants to keep it challenging for me and keeps tossing me the ‘interesting’ issues.
Like now. I have an old computer (well, not that old) serving as a multi-purpose server at home. It does my DNS-resolving, DHCP-serving, is a file server and is also the machine I do a lot of development on.
Yesterday I was playing some music which was located on this machine when suddenly it froze. I heard the CD-rom seeking and a beep which meant the machine had rebooted itself. Curious (and dreading at the same time) to see what was going on, I hooked my display and keyboard to the server.
At POST time I noticed that one of the RAID arrays had degraded. Apparently one of the 120GB Caviar drives finally bit the dust. Or so it seemed. Trying to rebuild the array (sometimes it’s just a silly hickup) did not solve it. Luckilly I got other drives of the same type.
Unfortunately for me, it was however not a simple case of replace hard drive. As soon as the new hard drive went in, the server started to reboot itself spontaneously…. repeatedly. Only when I removed the hard drive (which is seated in a removable 5.25 inch hard drive bay. The machine would boot normally.
I am now backing up everything I have on that machine on the (new) hard drive I bought for my PC. But even during backing up files the server will sometimes spontaneously reboot.
Once the file backup is complete I am left with the puzzle to figure out what the hell is wrong with the machine. Considering I tried 2 other hard drives (and I refuse to believe they are all faulty) I need to consider other causes. Is it the RAID-card drive bay, the IDE-cable or even the mainboard.
I guess I will have the fun part of figuring that out. Suggestions are welcome.