Sorry for the loss of the Micro Vibe web site this week. The motherboard in my server died (1 year old) and it took a while to restore the server hardware and get the site back up and running. I run this site on a Windows Home Server box I built. Over the past couple of months the server started to show a problem that it would always blue screen on an O/S restart. The blue screen of death reported that the AMD/ATI raid driver died. The server would always restart from a cold boot and showed no problems while running. The problem is that updates from Microsoft would attempt to restart the server every few weeks and the server would not restart.
Last week I decided that a new driver was required so I located the new version of the raid driver and installed it. After the install of the new raid driver the server could not be restarted. The blue screen of death reported that the new raid driver died. Since the server worked fine for months I decided to replace the power supply with a new one I had. No luck the machine was still not booting.
Next I tried to repair the home server install thinking I had a bad driver, or a corrupted file. The Windows Home Server repair simply reformats your boot partition and re-installs the system. After completing the repair the system no longer showed the blue screen of death, but would lockup solid on start-up. The server had no problem restarting six or seven times during the install process but did not restart once the O/S was loaded. In desperation I tried to replace the CPU and RAM by raiding my main computer, no luck the system still refused to boot. I then removed all four drives from the home server (carefully labeled them) and attached them one at a time to my Vista computer. All the drives tested fine.
Next day I found that if I removed all USB devices and let the system sit powered off for about 20 minutes it would boot. I could attach the mouse and keyboard once the system started up. The first thing I realized was that my web server configuration was lost because it was saved on the system partition that was reformated by the server O/S repair. I had copied the system partition to another computer a few days ago so I was not to worried about setting the site back up. After a few more restarts the server would no longer boot, no matter what I did it would just hang.
All that was left was to try to replace the motherboard. Asus no longer makes the motherboard in my server so I decided to try an Intel based single CPU server motherboard. The original motherboard was a high end workstation motherboard and I had a hard time loading drivers for all the strange and new hardware on the board under 2003 server. Most of the hardware used XP drivers as there was no 2003 drivers. The new server motherboard from Asus was designed to run 2003 and 2008 server and has eight SATA ports. I swapped out the old motherboard and CPU and installed the new Asus P5BV-C4L motherboard and an Intel Core 2 Duo CPU. I was careful to connect the SATA drives to the same ports as used on the old motherboard. The system stated up and the server found drivers for most of the motherboard devices with the exception of the LSI Mega raid. Since I had connected the SATA drives to the Intel SATA controller the system had no problems starting up. I loaded the newest drivers I could find and had no problems restarting the system. The system restarted over and over again. Windows Home Server did not mind the hardware change but did make me call Microsoft to activate the software. All of the data in my shared folders and all my computer backups came back without a problem. I did have to re-install the WHS connector software on my Windows computers to get the computers to see the server.
Server with new motherboard.
Spent most of Saturday morning getting the site back up and running. I lost the forums database (long story) but there were only about thirty posts so I can live with the loss. I did not like the forums component on the site. I removed the old forums from the site and added better forums support to the site. It is going to take a few days to get the new forums setup for each of the projects.
