So, our poor old media server dates from 2004ish. Although most of the hardware in it I think dates from 2003 (apart from the selection of hard disks). Last night, for reasons that have yet to be explained, the power supply circuit which feeds the upstairs and the ‘outbuilding’ tripped. I’m yet to work out what caused it because everything I can see is still working. Everything I’ve tried has come on without complaint…
Except the aged media PC which perked up and switched on but declined to join the network. It has no attached screen (nor keyboard) so this afternoon I pulled it into the house and lugged it up the stairs. It’s fairly hefty being a midi-tower basically filled with cheap hard disks.
I plugged it in and it passed POST and then sat at detecting hard disks. Attempting to coax it into setup made it just sit there more. Muttering dark curses at the lack of a UPS I rebooted it and just as I was about to give up, up came all the hard disks and lo it sat waiting cheerfully at a ‘I failed to boot last time, would you care for me to try a recovery mode’ prompt. A quick cycle through and check of the hard disks and it was back up and running.
I suspect what happened is this:
– Power went out causing a shutdown of an unfriendly variety.
– Machine came on and went URK! I must check my disks!
– Tried to check disks before booting but because there is a lot of storage in there and it’s not a very fast machine it takes a loooong time.
– I gave up trying to access it because it wasn’t appearing on the network, powered it down… and then the rest is tedious.
– First time I turned it on I was expecting failure so didn’t apply as much patience as I should have waiting for disks to be detected.
Still, it’s making me go back to thoughts of buying a UPS. Even a dinky one that basically has enough power for the computer just to shut down politely, that’d be nice.
