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Notes -
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?
Just because nobody else has mentioned it yet, LLMs are very useful for this kind of tech troubleshooting. It can be a bit frustrating dialling it in to the appropriate level and angle of investigation but the shear speed and detail of the replies can make it much more effective than waiting for replies on forums (speaking as a reluctant and unenthusiastic Linux user). Look up the motherboard model and ask it to help troubleshoot why it's getting stuck in a boot loop.
For my part, assuming it's a Windows PC and/or you're a Windows user, Hiren's Boot CD can be a handy tool if you have a spare USB stick. Skim through some YouTube videos if you need to know any more about it, they'll explain it better than I can (or again you could ask an LLM).
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