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In defiance of the typical advice to avoid making any decisions for a year, my husband's desktop died while I was getting a backup of the data.
I have gotten the external raids mounted on another system to get them backed up. That leaves me with the internal drives. I don't see a raid card in the machine but I could be wrong. The symptoms of the machine are getting stuck in a boot loop. It dies/restarts at different points so I think it's the power supply. A drive enclosure is significantly cheaper than a replacement 825w power supply. It could be memory, but there's only one module so I can't do the easy test of swapping out memory/sockets to see if the problem goes away.
I don't exactly want to decide to let his system be dead. He was a gamer & also did tons of graphics processing and he babied this thing. But neither my daughter nor I have his use cases and resurrecting this just to shut it down after I get a backup seems pointless. If the internal drives are in a raid my decision is made for me. But if they're not...
This is why they say to not make major decisions for a year. Not just because it's too easy to decide something in the throes of madness, but also because your ability to think just flat out goes out the window.
So. Would you rebuild it? Play one last game of Half Life 2 since he'll never get to play 3 (like there will ever be 3) with his daughter? Or focus on the data and get backups of his photos and digital art and leave the hunk of metal dead like its owner?
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.
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