So the power went out about three times yesterday, each time for maybe a few seconds. It was enough to knock out my server again, and this time it didn’t seem to want to come back up. I did a little screwing around with it last time it was doing this and it seemed like the power supply wasn’t supplying enough power to spin up the new drive, or at least that was my guess.
Today at work there were a couple of BCMs that had ‘bad’ power supplies. On the 5 volt rail the power supply is supposed to give out at least 4.7 volts and on one of our systems it was dipping below 4.7 every once in a while. This of course was causing alarm LEDs to light up, so we had to replace it. The old power supply would have gone in the garbage so I decided to take it home instead.
I popped the new supply into the server after removing the old one and voila, the hard drive spun up, no problem at all. Of course it may have been the 12 hours it had to cool off that helped, only time will tell.
I’m thinking that I’ll like take that new 160 GB drive out of the server anyways since I’m moving all my pictures to Flickr. My blog doesn’t need anywhere near that kind of space and the server seemed to behave a lot better with that old 20 GB drive in it so I think I’ll put it back in. Perhaps I’ll put the 160 GB in as a slave to the 20.