| Help debugging a power problem Here's the problem, perhaps you could help me debug it.
I have a linux box I designed to be a personal file server, stuff where I can store files I want to keep. I don't have a display attached to it on a regular basis, nor mouse/keyboard.
I have an old Asus A7V (not the A revision), with a 900 MHz Athlon in it, and 512 of ram (various qualities, 1x256 and 2x128). I have 4 Maxtor 30 GB hard-drives in removeable drive bays all attached to a Promise SX4000 card. It had performed well for about 10 months. It had been attached to a UPS, and only once had it died on me (I'm still not sure why, it said it had lost one of the drives, but none of the hard-drives seemed worse for wear). That was with RedHat 7.3. Promise had within the last couple months released the 8/9 drivers, so I reinstalled the computer with RedHat 8. The drivers were fishy, and their instructions were half-assed, but it seemed to take. Over the last few weeks, I've noticed it dying. I thought it was because of the stupidity of ICS, but now I'm thinking otherwise.
There had been a storm that took out power a few weeks ago. My dad had switched the power wiring on me to get the house router back up. Basically, all the computers were running off one extension cord running to an outlet that didn't hold it in properly (that outlet was hooked up to a generator). Because I had been both lazy and very busy, I hadn't corrected the problem because all the computers worked. That is, until today.
I was transfering some files to the linux box via Samba, and all the sudden I lost my connection. It had done this once before, so I decided to hook up a monitor to see what had happened. What I saw was a looping error message about a SCSI device (note: in Linux, a RAID device is usually treated as a SCSI device). So I reboot. It freezes during startup. I reboot again. Kernel panic. Ok, so now I think I'm screwed. Let's try again and try to get to a prompt and do an fsck. I get a message from the BIOS saying something is out of wack, and to check the hardware monitor. So I do. It has highlighted the 5V line, marking it as 4.4 (I think, I was careless and just left at that point). So I shut everything down. I figure it's got to be that extension cord, and I rewire everything, this time re-attaching the computer to a non-UPS plug on the UPS (I think it does voltage regulation, just not battery backup). I turn it on, and hit "del" to go to the BIOS. It freezes and nothing shows up.
Oh, the powersupply is an Antec 550W. Oh, and I had a problem with having both my CD-Writer AND all 4 hard-drives showing up. So I unplugged the CD-Writer. I assumed it was a power-thing.
I'm thinking the motherboard is fried. Any suggestions on further testing? |