While doing a number of disk-consolidation activities this past week, Berlin was struck by an extreme heat-wave. The Web GUI did alert me a number of times about disk temperatures rising above 50 degrees celsius, but would usually drop below the 46 celsius threshold shortly after.

At some point, 3 days ago, at the height of the heat-wave, the WebGUI started to behave wonky (pages wouldn't load properly, etc.), and I initiated a clean reboot, from which the system never returned. It couldn't be reached anymore by WebGUI or SSH. I asked someone at the location to please press the power button for 3-5 seconds to force the machine to be off, and then again to initiate a start, but was told that the machine's screen shows that it isn't booting...I will need to go there, today, to see at which point it fails.

Someone at my friend's web-agency, where the system is co-located, told me yesterday that he heard my server beep repeatedly as early as 4 days ago, so my question now is: since unRAID boots off the USB Flash drive (which is on the motherboard, in my server), what are the most likely candidates for failure after a heat-stroke situation like this? Where to start trouble-shooting what component is failing? Could mobo, CPU and/or RAM have been  damaged to such a degree that it/they won't work anymore? Could the boot Flash stick have been damaged?

I'll be heading over there in a bit to take a look at the screen, but I fear that something was damaged...but what?

4 hours ago, tillkrueger said:

Could mobo, CPU and/or RAM have been  damaged to such a degree that it/they won't work anymore? Could the boot Flash stick have been damaged?

yes

 

 

I would start by isolating the system from unRaid by removing the boot usb. if it passes the bios boot process, then that implies the hardware mostly checks out. power down, put the usb back in, boot and see what happens. if it fails to boot, the usb could be damaged (hard to say without seeing what occurs on the screen, if it makes it to the unRaid os load-in...) 

thanks, ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

your suggested steps sound logical, and if anything like this should ever happen (again), they will be my first course of action, but I have actually deleted this topic after returning from looking at the server, earlier...no idea how this is still here, but now that you have answered my post, I guess it's best to leave it up as "solved", in case someone else ever runs into a situation like this.

but as it turns out, when I went to take a look at my server, earlier, I hit the power button, and watched it boot right into unRAID's login prompt, like nothing bad had ever happened. I never cease to be amazed by how dependable my old trusty system has been running for what must now go on 15 years, with only a few hardware upgrades in all that time (better drive-cages/cables, SATA controller, CPU and more RAM),  but all on the original mobo.

sorry for the false alarm, but I'm happy to be back up and running