Aaaaaaagggghh! Curses!

We went to a small gathering the other evening, to bid our adieus to a few folks who are soon departing Dorothy's organization. A nice evening, though the roast beef happened to be a little bit chewy.

I'd spent a lot of the day at home, working on a new computer setup. I upgraded my existing computer, and then used leftover parts (plus some new) to build a storage server on our home network. It would give us nearly automatic backups of our existing computers and lots of extra storage for digital photos and such. Of course, some of the steps were pretty slow, like taking some 2-3 hours to sincronize a pair of mirrored 200 GB hard drives.

I'd pretty well completed everything at the time we left for the banquet, and when an evening thunderstorm rolled in, I didn't think much about it (other than some concern for one cat who had stayed outside). When we got home, we got Stuart indoors to get dry, then I went to check on e-mail...

And I saw that the storage server was silent, and had just a little blinking green light... it had gone into sleep mode, I thought, and continued about my business. However, when I attempted to wake the storage server, I had no luck at all. Then I tried to do the control-alt-delete thing, and still no response. Finally, I had to turn of the power-strip, and it turned off. But when I powered back up, then hit the on-button, nothing happened.

I fiddled with it for a few hours, and never could get it to even begin the boot process. It was, to steal a line from a famous film "...not just merely dead, but really, truly, clearly dead!" It's either the motherboard or the CPU that got fried (though it's strange... none of the other computer equipment in the house was affected), and so now I need to go through the parts swap drill until I can figure out just exactly what has failed. Grrr! This is going to take about two weeks to accomplish, I fear, and I am not going to be a happy camper in the interim. At least my main computer is working without any apparent problems. Thank God for small favors!


DaveK