I wrote previously about my two failed hard drives. The story, unfortunately, didn’t end there. A few days later, I started getting some goofy boot up behaviors that pointed to a bad BIOS. It would get stuck at “Loading operating system.” This was a transient thing that I had seen before but now it was consistent. I tried to update the BIOS and that said it succeeded but after that it never got past the logo screen for the motherboard. Oops. I tried pulling the CMOS battery to reset the BIOS but nothing I tried got me past that logo. I decided it was time to replace the motherboard even though it was only four years old.
The CPU was an LGA1156 socket and unfortunately they don’t make motherboards for that anymore. I had to buy a new CPU too. I really didn’t need any additional power in that server box, but I did upgrade a little. Here’s what I got:
- MSI Z87-G41 PC Mate LGA1150 Motherboard $90 after rebate
- Intel Core i5-4590 $179
The swap went pretty quickly and easily with no problems. It booted right up and I didn’t have to reinstall Windows or anything. I did have to reactivate it but a quick phone to a robot call took care of that.
I kind of suspect that the second hard drive failure was more of a motherboard failure than a drive failure. I’ll run some thorough SpinRite tests on it before putting it to use again.
P.S. Happy Birthday Dad!