So… two things. As of today I’ve got a few days off, for the first time in a year that didn’t involve anyone dying. After the past two weeks at work, I can safely predict that someone would’ve been dying if I hadn’t gotten a few days off. Even the expanded-hours training schedule we’ve been on lately was truncated today, so I got to go home today after – get this! – only eight hours.
And then the fun really began. I get home and bring my two desktop machines out of standby, and my older machine – a Dell Dimension I’ve had since ’05 that has served faithfully even though I sometimes think the best thing for it would be a reformat of the ol’ C drive and a solid kick right between the registry – sounded like it was gonna freakin’ take off. The fan keeps getting louder… and the pitch of this loud whine it’s making keeps rising… and I had a bit of a flashback.
So I did now what I did then: pulled the plug out of the back.
Bad move. When I waited a couple of minutes and reconnected the power cord to the power supply, the thing stayed asleep when I tried to wake it up.
Let’s pause for a moment and see what all this machine does that I don’t/can’t do on any other machines in the house:
- My entire DVD-burning capacity is tied up in this machine.
- This machine plays cartoons out to a TV (hooked up as a secondary monitor) for Evan.
- This machine has my entire music/audio collection on it, and the vast majority of my digital video files (all Doctor Who and Star Trek, and spinoffs thereof, reside on the F drive on this machine).
- This machine has the master DVD ISO files, and all of the master video files, for all of my DVD productions to date.
- This machine has my (half-dozen or so) books-in-progress on it.
- This machine is my LAN hub.
- This machine has all of my photos of my son on it.
Okay, I think you get it: double-plus-non-good. Fortunately, after about half an hour of trying to call friends in the know, I tried to power the Dell up again… and this time, it woke up.
I think the plan is to keep it awake until further notice, giving me a little bit of time to buy a new power supply, without it being an ohshitgottagetanewonenow thing. But I’m under no illusion that it’ll stay awake forever waiting for me to finish that search at a leisurely pace.
This has not been my year for power supplies.
I don’t know what it is, but I’ve seen this happen multiple times before, and it’s always been on a Dell. I hate decidedly non-technical explanations and solutions, but there’s “something” with Dells and their power supplies that when they lose power unexpectedly, the power button on the front of the machine doesn’t work. We’ve been running Dells at work now for almost ten years, and I have (counting in my head) at least four up and running here at the house, and I’ve seen this same issue many times.
“Pivo” (my living room PVR) runs on a Dell Dimension and on a few occasions I’ve come home from work and noticed that our power went out here at home while I was away. I ran into the same thing you did. Pivo wouldn’t turn on, and I assumed it was fried. I unplugged/replugged the power cord, and still got nothing. Convinced the power supply was dead, I went out to the garage to find a new power supply. When I came back to the living room, I tried the button one more time, and it worked! That machine in particular has done this to me at least three times now. I don’t know what causes it, but there’s something in there that doesn’t get reset after a quick power outage, something that unplugging the machine from the wall for 30 seconds doesn’t fix, but two minutes does.
Like I said, I hate non-technical mumbo jumbo, but you’re not alone.
With that out the way, you need to set up a backup plan for some of those things, immediately. TigerDirect has 2tb drives for $99 this week — drive space isn’t an issue anymore. If you don’t have a spare external caddy for the drive, hook it up in another machine and do backups between machines. Schedule a task using rsync or robocopy (both free), utilities that can check directories and only copy over new or changed files. I make two copies of my digital photo directory every single night this way.