[turtle]

My SME Server died tonight. The power supply took out the battery back up with it so I'm not sure what in the box is worth saving. I was at work when my wife text messages me telling me that the server was making some really bad noises and squeals. The power light and other lights were flashing and doing "weird" things.

Since I wasn't at work I couldn't do anything about it until after work. Once I finally got home after work and church I looked into the matter. I found the battery back up was in constant alarm status even under no load. Not a good sign to start with. I plugged my media center into another power strip and it powered right up.

My server on the other hand didn't respond as well. When I turned it on the power light flashed once and I heard the sound of a cap discharging. I then pulled the cover off the computer and could smell the smell of fried components. You know that unmistakable scent that just tell you it's going to cost you money to fix this one. Yeah, it was that smell. The board "looked" fine, but that's not very reliable.

So if I were to replace the power supply in this I think I might find more dead components and then realize that I'm spending more to fix this machine that I would have spent getting a new one. I looked into a Mac Pro with OS X server, but it's not in my budget right now. SME is free and very functional for my needs right now. Plus I can put it on any x86 system.

I'd like to stay under $500 total for this and not loose my data. The problem I'm having is not knowing Linux and how to pull my data off of the server once I get the drives pulled out of it. I had two 300GB drives in a RAID 1 configuration to minimize loss. In a case like this it ups my chances that one of the disks survived the fault.

Any ideas? Any one here familiar with SME Server enough to help? So what kind of system should I buy in order to drop my drives into and be able to "pick up where I left off"? My now dead system is an Athlon 64. Can I change over to something like an Intel Core 2 Duo without loosing my data? If I just go with all new gear, can I pull the data off of my old system even if I go with a clean install?