I've been out of town for most of the last four months. One of the first things I did after "docking" my laptop was fire up the arcade cabinet. It booted right up and I was very happy and relieved to see that none of the hard drives had died while I was away.
I store a copy of my Duplicity backups on my arcade cabinet (it is also my home file server), so I kicked off my script that rsyncs the backups on my laptop over to the arcade cabinet. Less than a minute later, I hear the drives and fans in the arcade cabinet spin down...
I scratched my head, walked back over, and turned it back on. This time it shut off about half way through the boot sequence. I got down on my back and crawled underneath. I felt like I was checking to make sure the oil filter on my DSM was snug (I'd had mine come loose before, the spindle screwed into the oil cooler could be problematic).
While I was looking up into the guts, I hit the power button. Things were pretty dark from that angle, and I didn't think to bring a flash light. I touched the CPU fan, it was spinning. I touched the power supply fan... It was not spinning.
At least it is an easy problem, just a dead power supply fan. I'm not surprised that it died, this power supply is probably over four years old by now.
The silver lining
My good friend Brian gave me one of his old video cards: an NVIDIA GeForce GTS 240. This card is a massive upgrade over the arcade cabinet's current NVidia GeForce 6200LE, and tons more horsepower than I'm going to need. The dead power supply is lacking the 6 pin PCIe power connector required by the new card.
I ordered a new power supply. It should be here in a few of days. I'll just have to survive without my home file server for a little while. This is so much better than coming home to a dead hard drive, or worse, TWO dead hard drives...
Update 2011-11-02:
The power supply arrived, but it didn't fix the problem... It powered up for a minute or two and then shut itself down. I crawled underneath the cabinet again and started poking at things with my finger and noticed that the CPU heat sink was wobbling:
The little nub that holds the heat sink clip snapped off. I ordered a new bracket, so now I get to wait again.
I got to take a look at the old power supply now that it is out of the case. It actually has two fans, but I couldn't see the second without removing the monitor. I tested it out by shorting pins 15 and 16 to start up the power supply. Both fans started right up.
I clearly remember sticking a "non conductive instrument" (aka a cheap ball point pen). I don't recall hearing the usual "THWAP, THWAP, THWAP" sound that usually occurs when you do that with a spinning fan. I'm starting to think that I should be questioning my sanity!
See also:
- Cocktail Arcade Cabinet Build: Part 1 - Planning and Testing
- Cocktail Arcade Cabinet Build: Part 2 - Cutting the Boards and Building the Box
- Cocktail Arcade Cabinet Build: Part 3 - Rounding Off the Edges
- Cocktail Arcade Cabinet Build: Part 4 - I Love/Hate Plexiglas
- Cocktail Arcade Cabinet Build: Part 5 - Slots for the T-Molding
- Cocktail Arcade Cabinet Build: Part 6 - Fitting the Joysticks
- Cocktail Arcade Cabinet Build: Supplemental - a Mistake to Avoid When Choosing a Display
- Cocktail Arcade Cabinet Build: Part 7 - Applying the Vinyl
- Cocktail Arcade Cabinet Build: Part 8 - Painting Plexi and Installing T-Molding
- Cocktail Arcade Cabinet Build: Part 9 - The Computer Hardware and Software
- Cocktail Arcade Cabinet Build: Part 10 - The Finished Cabinet
- The Unfortunate Death of the Cocktail Arcade Cabinet
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