Well....a ghost lives in my server

Hello to every body and greetings from Greece

I have a rather unusual situation and i am running out of ideas. I have this old server (IBM x205 - P4 2.4Ghz,3xSCSI 36gb) and about a year ago I decided to use it as an additional domain controller and fax & file server. For this task I had a Delock 70154 SATA card along with 2x320 SATA II HDDs

Everything was going super smoothly until about 3 weeks ago. I was on a trip and I was informed when I got back that the server was found frozen. Well, I considered it was a glitch since a simple power down / power up fixed everything. Again, two weeks ago another freeze situation. It got suspicious, but again after a power down / power up everything was running.

Again it froze and when I powered it up it came with a message that the domain services could not start due to NTDS corruption. Booting in safe mode revealed that there was an issue with the SATA Raid (degraded).

After a lot of searching I degraded the server, cleaned Active Directory, pulled both HDDs out (one of these was really BAD) and recovered my files (I had some problems with ho Delock handles the redudant HDD).

Right now my server is vanilla simple with only what the factory installed. Here is where the fun begins. Everyday when I arrive at the office I find this particular machine dead and I mean totally dead. Just a black screen and nothing else. The CPU fan is working, the PSU is working. Keyboard and mouse are dead (they also lock my KVM) as is the network. The machine is DEAD.

I power it down forcefully and then power it up. For the 8 hours I am in the office it works, either idling or running some kind of diagnostic. When I leave the office, after some time (maybe after 30 minutes, maybe after 4 hours) the machine dies. This is the information the event log shows

"the previous shutdown at xx:xx:xx was unexpected"

I have tried the following: Memtest: nothing showed up Passmark burn in test: nothing showed up Carefull study of the event log: nothing of interest that I can see Set the option to not autostart after a crash so that I could see BSODs: nothing to see Power scheme is set to never sleep.

I know there are a lot of other tools that heavily stress a machine like OCCT but the machine is old. Today I will give them a try nevertheless. One idea is to reformat it, but I really like to find what is causing this because I could get to a situation that everything is working for a while and then kaboom, one day again it is dying. I really need a helping hand and every opinion / idea is welcomed. I know the obvious solution is to never leave the office but I have a life. Sorry server. :)

P.S This situation with the machine dying has been going on for about one week. Everyday I would set either the RAID to rebuild or to copy/recover files and while everythig was working

Solution 1:

Sounds like a very old server. Also sounds like it is dying a slow and painful death. There is a reason why most IT departments replace their hardware after a certain period of time. The reason is because it costs far too much money to support old hardware. I'm betting that the server you have is 6-8 years old. Get rid of it. It will be more trouble than it's worth. You probably have a bad motherboard or a bad processor. You probably won't be able to find either one new so you'll have to buy used parts. With the used parts, you don't know if you're introducing new problems into your server. Like I said, just get rid of it. It's not worth the effort/time/money you're going to have to put into it.

Solution 2:

Well i found the ghost.....it took some time but eventually i got it. The problem was due to leaked capacitors...one of them decided that it is time to stop wasting my time and popped its fluids out... So hopefully its time for something new....:)