My main server was turned off for a month (was working fine prior to that). I came back yesterday, turned it on, and it was fine for a few hours, then became unresponsive - could not ping, but the machine was still on).

 

Apparently one of the drives was failing, or on its way there. I re-seated SATA and power cables (no joy), then removed the drive.

 

Now the system is consistently shutting down just after completing loading bzimage. I run a check disk on the USB flash drive and it looks fine.

 

This build is several years old, and I am temped to start a new one anyway, but I am wondering if anyone has any idea about the odd shutdown behavior.

Sounds like hardware to me. Bad motherboard, memory or PSU could all cause those symptoms.

 

If the board is several years old, have you checked for bad capacitors?

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Capacitor_plague

Sounds like hardware to me. Bad motherboard, memory or PSU could all cause those symptoms.

 

If the board is several years old, have you checked for bad capacitors?

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Capacitor_plague

 

I agree. No bad caps I can see, but that does not mean they're fine. I re-seated power connectors and RAM, but the server keeps shutting itself down.  I just wonder why this consistently happens at the same time (after it's done loading bzimage), maybe a small power surge at that point.

It is worth checking that all fans are working.  If one of them is not working properly (especially the processor fan) it can cause this sort of symptom.

Have you tried running memtest?

 

What about heat? CPU Fan OK?

It is worth checking that all fans are working.  If one of them is not working properly (especially the processor fan) it can cause this sort of symptom.

 

Yup, CPU fan (and the rest of them) is working. CPU itself is quite old, an E6750 that was recycled from a previous build.  I think I'm going to get new build going around a Supermicro X10SL7-F, and take the opportunity to install unRAID 6.