Hello everyone.  I've had my unraid system for about a year now, but the PC I used to build it is pretty old (~5 years but new HDD's).  I was planning on upgrading soon anyways and this is sort of forcing my hand.  Anyways, I had a 3, 4TB drive system, I went to clean it out the other day (dusty) and had a catastrophe.  I powered it down properly, unplugged everything, lied it down, and sprayed it all out with some canned air.  When I went to power it on again... nothing.  I went ahead and opened the side and tried to power it on, green light on mobo is on, all fans spin for a sec, but no POST or anything, then they immediately shut down again.  I began to remove pieces (move the ram around etc) to try to see what the problem was but sadly nothing seemed to work. 

 

So at this point I'm ready to give up on the machine and rebuild, which is great.  However, I was hoping to retrieve the data from the disks before I did so, so that I wouldn't screw anything up on the new system and lose anything.  I read about the reiserfs file system and a lot of the applications used to access these disks from windows.  I borrowed a SABRENT usb 2.0 to sata adapter from work and came home to retrieve the data.  I cannot seem to access the data on either of the drives..  At this point I'm pretty much panicking.  All the important stuff is backed up, but I still would hate to lose this data.  I've tried YAReG, Diskinternals Linux Reader, and several others.  None of them seem to do the trick.  I also tried booting from an Ubuntu 11 live usb drive still no luck.  For example, in DiskInternals, I can see "ReiserFS Volume 1" and how big the drive is, but when I go to access it I get "Can't open disk: ReiserFS Volume 1 Check the disk and try again."  I'm really hoping that I'm just doing something wrong here.  What are the odds that the system would run perfectly, then when I went to power it down and clean it, the machine would stop working, and all my drives would die..  I've attached my latest syslog file, and I was running unraid v. 5.0-rc12.  Does anyone have any advice for a next step to take?  Thanks in advance for any help. 

 

Edit: here are the system specs.

Antec NSK6580B Black 0.8mm cold-rolled steel ATX Mid Tower

ASUS P5Q3 LGA 775 Intel P45 ATX Intel Motherboard

COOLER MASTER Real Power Pro RS-850-EMBAD1-US 850W

Intel Core 2 Quad Q9550 Yorkfield Quad-Core 2.83GHz LGA 775

Kingston ValueRAM 2GB 240-Pin DDR3 SDRAM DDR3 1333 (PC3 10600)

and MSI R4870 Radeon HD 4870 1GB 256-Bit GDDR5 PCI Express 2.0 since it used to be my main PC.

syslog-20140708-171815.zip

First of all, the likelihood of all your disks dying along with the PC is pretty much nil - unless it got shocked by lightening or something.

 

I am not sure why you are unable to see the contents in Windows, but to be honest I've never tried. Since all the data should be on your drives you should have nothing to worry about. Just get a new UnRAID system up and running, and see where you are.

 

For your old motherboard, the only thing I don't see you mentioning that may be worth trying is to reset the BIOS. There is usually a jumper you can move to wipe the BIOS config and get you back to default. This may help, or may not.

 

Since you were running UnRAID 5.0 you don't need to worry about what order you have the disks back in the system. You will want to know which was your parity drive, and cache drive (if you used on), but the data disks can be added back in any order.

 

If you really want piece of mind, then you can add all the drives to the Windows machine you have (and remove the Windows disk) and then boot UnRAID up from the USB key. If your original config still works, you should see everything come up and you can take a breath. Even if your USB key doesn't work you can use a new one to test the disks out.

 

 

Thanks for the response, I'm going to start looking into what to buy for a new system now I suppose.  I'm still a little confused as to why this happened in the first place.  Even if it were to have gotten zapped by lightning, would it continue to run completely fine right up until I shut it down? I didn't try a jumper on the mobo but I did remove the CMOS battery.  I thought that would wipe it but I could be wrong, might be worth trying. 

Thanks for the response, I'm going to start looking into what to buy for a new system now I suppose.  I'm still a little confused as to why this happened in the first place.  Even if it were to have gotten zapped by lightning, would it continue to run completely fine right up until I shut it down? I didn't try a jumper on the mobo but I did remove the CMOS battery.  I thought that would wipe it but I could be wrong, might be worth trying.

 

Removing the battery can take a lot longer to wipe the config. The jumper is instant.

 

As to why it happened, who can say. Like anything else, it takes less effort to continue running than it does to start up or shut down. Something may have broke during one of those operations. Or, in all your cleaning you've managed to screw something up that is causing your issue. I would disconnect, and reconnect every cable on the motherboard. You said you tried the ram, but you may want to remove and reseat the cpu (if you have thermal paste handy).

 

As much as computers are a science, there is also a bit of luck and mystery involved. Weird stuff can happen.

 

I had a problem like this one time, and it was a badly plugged memory module. Maybe worth a closer look.

I haven't been able to figure out the problem yet, but I do have parts for a new build coming.  Should be here Tuesday or Wednesday.  I'll report back after I get it up and running.  I'm really hoping not to lose these drives.

Great news!  I just put together the new system and booted off my thumbdrive.  Everything is intact!  Thanks so much for all the help, it's really appreciated. 

If I had to guess I would say that it's probably the power supply that died.  If it was running for a very long time without a cold restart, components (probably capacitors) could have slowly aged and worn out.  When you power on the computer there is a large peak of inrush current that stresses components far more than normal operation, and those components may not have been able to handle it anymore.  The inrush provided the extra push to destroy something and boom!  Dead power supply.  May have continued running for years had you left it on.

 

You might still have a working system sans power supply.