Hello
today I woke up to find my unRAID server is completely frozen,
restarted it and it won't post.
when I press the power button, it powers on and after 3 seconds it powers off and on again and the cycle continues until I unplug the power cord.
the ram stick was plugged to slot A1 (I have only one ram stick !), switched the stick to slot B1, now it won't restart like before but all I see is a black screen so it didn't help either.
finally I switched the ram stick to slot B2 and the server worked !
it seems that the problem is with the motherboard but could it also be with the ram stick ?
is it safe to continue using these parts for a few months more or should I replace them immediately ?

 

How valuable is your data? Do you have backups?

 

From your description, it sounds like your motherboard may be saving you from yourself, but if it happens to boot properly and data gets garbled while in transit around the board through the RAM, you could end up with corrupted drives.

 

I wouldn't fully trust it even if it boots properly, but 24+ hours of memtest coming up clean might convince me to keep using it for a while, as long as I had an out if it started mangling data.

A couple of more possibilities. 

 

The power supply.  A very small percentage but a quicker, relatively cheap and easy item to check out. 

 

That MB appears to be rather new so I would suspect that the build is also.  Make sure that the CPU cooler is firmly latched down.  There has been one case recently where the locking screws for the heat sink were not properly secured allowing the heat sink to break its bond with the CPU. 

I keep regular backups of the important files, I'll do memory test soon.
no, it's not a new build, I've been using this build for more than a year and the ram for nearly two years (it was in my old pc build), and I had not a single problem until two days ago when I had a kernel panic, I did a parity recheck and I encountered no errors(that's because all of the dockers are accessing my files in read only mode).

it's a strange thing that such problems happened twice while plex was generating media preview thumbnails, first time it was a system crash that showed some messages in the console, but this time, the console is completely frozen but with no errors like the first time.
I mean, the server was running fine for about 15 hours after the crash, it froze after a few hours from when plex started generating the preview thumbnails

Edited April 26, 20197 yr by sadeq

as for the power supply, there is one thing that concerns me when it comes to power, I'm using an online ups for all my stuff, and I'm sure that the AC coming from it is not a pure sine wave, but I doubt such thing would harm the psu or the components, I've been using this ups for months without a problem !