Well....a ghost lives in my server...

Posted by tsgiannis on Server Fault See other posts from Server Fault or by tsgiannis
Published on 2010-12-30T06:10:26Z Indexed on 2010/12/30 6:56 UTC
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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 i was about a year ago i decided to use it as an additional domain controller,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 informermed when i got back that the server was found frozen...well i considered it was a glitch since a simple powerdown power up fixed everything.Again 2 weeks ago another freeze situation....it got suspicious but again power down power up everything was running.... Last again it frozen and when i power 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 and 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 and here is where the fun begins. Everyday when i arrive at the office i find this particular machine dead..and i mean total 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) ...network is dead.... the machine is DEAD. I power it down forcilly ...i power it up and 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..it maybe half an hour ...it maybe 4 hours the machine dies...at least this is the information the event log shows (" the previous shutdown at xx:xx:xx was unexpected) Well i must admit i am runnig out of ideas.... I have tried Memtest....nothing Passmark burn in test.....nothing Carefull study of the event log.....nothing Set Instead of restart..BSOD....nothing Power sceheme to sleep...all set to never.

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 kaboom...one day again is dying.. I really need a helping hand and every opinion / idea is well welcomed.... iknow the obvious solution is to never leave the office but....i have a life...sory server...:)

P.S this situation with the machine dying some time after is 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

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