Wednesday, June 21, 2006

Power Spikes are NOT good

We had a high voltage power spike in our street last week. The power went off for a couple of hours. Initially we thought we had got away scot free when the power came back on and we turned everything back on. Slowly however we have come to realise the damage.
So far we have had one computer that had a hard drive fail, a power supply fail and the motherboard not report correctly in the bios. PC failed to boot. I have replaced the mb, CPU, ram, hard drive and power supply and rebuilt that computer. This computer had not been protected by a UPS.
The UPS on the SBS server took the hit and the battery now fails to hold a charge properly. It would appear that the SBS server took some damage also as it now intermittently turns off or restarts. Not good. I will need to replace this machine in order to get reliability back.
Another UPS now clicks on and off frequently - I am not sure why. It was protecting the Linux server - our internet gateway. I think this UPS needs replacing also.
The Laptop which wasn't on a UPS now will not boot up correctly - it can boot into safe mode with no network support only. As soon as you try and boot up in any other mode it refuses to login. I'm hoping that this is just requires an OS reinstall, but suspect it is more sinister than this. The hard drive does not sound like it is healthy - it grinds and whirs away when it is trying to boot and log in.

The only good news in all this is that we a) have an insurance policy for this very thing and b) the power company ENERGEX has admitted that there was a high voltage power spike and are sending us a letter to use with our insurance claim.

Oh and we get a bunch of new computer gear!!!


Posted by: Jethro | 11:48 AM |