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Notes -
First of all, I’m so sorry for your loss.
My opinion is that you should work on getting a backup of his data and not worry so much about repairing the computer. There’s an SOP in IT that you should always focus on data recovery first, and that’s something I try to follow in my personal life. You never know what might be in his disk partition that would be meaningful.
I doubt you’re in a place where the resale value of his computer plays much of a role in your thinking. I don’t know that I would be. I actually don’t know enough about the secondary component market to say whether it would be worth it for that reason to invest in a repair, but of course that depends on what the problem is.
I can’t read a fellow geek’s mind, but I can say that hardware raid with raid cards has gone out of fashion in the consumer enthusiast space. Motherboards often have raid features built in, but those have also gone out of fashion, because they’re unreliable and often lead to tough data recovery situations at times like this.
I’d presume the system uses Windows, in which case my main concern would be not getting bitlockered out of the data on the drive. Microsoft’s hard disk encryption… isn’t great, but it’s persnickety, and often works by only allowing access to the data on the drives from the computer itself, based on hardware encryption keys. If he was using bitlocker, that would definitely make repairing the system as it stands your best option. This scenario would make the SATA-to-USB adapter option unfortunately not viable.
Boot loops could be the power supply (although that’s not really where my mind would go to first) but it could also be a lot of things, of course. Including software issues. Since you’re in that place where you’re dealing with grief and decision making/critical thinking can be impaired, this might be a situation where asking a friend or family member with IT experience, or hiring a reputable PC repair company, would be the right call, even if you have the technical experience to do some troubleshooting yourself. Grief and data loss are two things I wouldn’t want mixed.
I am fortunately not having to worry about money. We'd been planning for his retirement so we were already financially set up to not need his salary, and I have always intended to work until they cart me out of the building kicking and screaming. But everyone should plan for these eventualities. I won't qualify for the social security widows benefit until I'm 60, several years from now. If we'd been a single income household (or if I'd only had a pin money job) and not planned for a potential early death (our daughter's over 20, so if we'd done a 20 year term life insurance policy on him when we had her, it'd be done by now), things could be rough right now. And tough even were I 60, bluntly. If you take it at 60 you're cutting your monthly pay by something like 28% and if you needed to take it at 60 the odds of you having a better benefit to swap to once you're at FRA are pretty low.
Thank you for mentioning the built in raid - that's a feature on his system. I was thinking of a repair company, mostly because we're old enough that most of us who played with hardware haven't in ages beyond bespoke gaming rigs, and we've all been down sizing which means our piles of spares have been whittled away. But since asking anyone else (friends or repair service) to work on the system comes with the non-zero possibility that it gets hosed, I want to do every (non-destructive) thing I can think of first.
DP Xeon (?) is pretty niche for a gaming rig -- it's more of a 'rule of cool' hobby project since about 2015, although I'm still pretty down with it myself. (not for gaming tho)
I think if you can get the BIOS to open (F12, [Del] or some other brand-dependant key on POST) there will be an option showing you whether the board's built-in RAID is enabled -- I don't know your husband, but if he is like me he would not have done this, and slapping the drive in an enclosure will be sufficient. This is all that most 'repair companies' would be up for anyways, and I think USB cages are like $10 on Amazon nowadays? My recommendation is to just do that yourself, unless you see some RAID settings in the BIOS or another system has trouble with the drive -- in which case you might be stuck troubleshooting the hardware a bit. PSU would not be my first guess -- presumably the system was working previously, so I wouldn't think sizing would be an issue?
I have tried to catch it in a boot to get to the bios, so far no luck. I found an external enclosure and the drive didn't mount/wasn't recognized. I'll find another and then check a different drive, too.
I think the system was working previously, but it's a guess. He'd been feeling a bit under the weather before things got bad, so it had possibly been late November since he touched the computer. He asked me to turn it off once he went into the hospital, which was late December, and then it was late January/early February when I first tried to get a backup of it and at that point it didn't boot successfully. The UPS it was on also died sometime during this time period, which is probably also influencing my desire to blame the power supply. Even though all other electronics in the house are fine so I don't think we got hit with a power surge, which even if we did, the UPS should have absorbed it. I'll run through the things I can do, then see if there's a repair company that can do something other than what I've done. And based on the input I've gotten here, I'll consider that good enough.
Polling for the BIOS key should be the very first thing that the system does after POST pretty much, though -- if it's boot-looping at various points in the process, this should be possible.
What's the specific motherboard? As I said, DP systems are quite niche in desktop/gaming use these days but there are niche communities associated that may be able to help -- the boards are server-oriented and can be quirky.
If it truly won't enter the BIOS menu that's a pretty big clue in itself -- standard procedure would be to unplug absolutely everything from the board but one stick of RAM, a keyboard and mouse, enter the BIOS using onboard VGA (if present) and proceed from there.
Thanks for these tips. It turns out it was the power supply. I got a replacement (someone on ebay lost their motherboard & was parting out their old bits, serendipity!), popped it in the case, and am mid-backup now.
I had taken it down a minimalist system and it was still exhibiting the behavior & I was going to swap out memory if the psu didn't fix the issue. I really appreciate the additional trouble shooting steps. They let me do things while I was waiting for the power supply to come, and it helped to think I might make progress. Maybe I'll bury the old power supply in the back yard since his computer apparently got broken heart syndrome.
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