Big problem!

Got home from work and tried to Remote Desktop into Server to check the backups that I started in the morning, but I got an error saying that that server was not there!!  I then noticed that the server was powered off!   I turned it on and it appeared to boot, then I tried to connect again and it wouldn't.  

I left the room and when I came back it was off again.   I disconnected the external drive just see if that was the problem.  I then connected the monitor back up to machine to see what was happening.

 When it booted again, I saw the blue screen that something was wrong, but I really couldn't make out exactly what.  It mentioned something about hardware and said to remove any newly attached hardware.  Then the computer played a series of tones and shut down again.  The only “new” hardware I added was the external HD to do the backup of the shares, but it connected fine and was backing up to it when I left in the morning.  Plus, at this point I had already unplugged the drive from the server.

I had this happen many times, but each time it was different.  Sometimes it would go all of the way into WHS and then play the tones and shut down.  A couple of time it just kept rebooting.  A couple of times it played the tones and shut down before it even tried to load windows.

I don't know what the problem is.  Luckily I have the parts to rebuild it and I don’t' think that was anything on it that isn't replacable...yet.  It appears that only about 80GB got backed up on the external drive out of 200GB, so the backup was never completed before it died the first time.  As long as I don’t have any problems with any of my PC’s that were being backed up by the server, I shouldn’t need to try to get the data off of the drives before I do the rebuild.  I should just be able to wipe them and start over.

Honestly, I am not too surprised by this.  The hardware that is (was) running my server is over 9 years old.  The processor is an AMD Athlon XP 1600 that ran at about 1.45Ghz.  I cannot remember what the motherboard is because it has been so long.  I even have a couple of SCSI optical drives in it, because when I bought them, they were the best and fastest!!