Server keeps shutting itself down after ~1 hour and 45 min

[guest]

At first I thought this was because of heat or maybe a powersupply issue. So I replaced the power supply and opened the case up for better air flow. Then I realized it was turning off after about the same amount of time each time it shut down so I almost knew it wasnt any hardware fault.

So when I was remotely controlling it waiting for it to shut down it was about 1 hour and 40 min uptime and then all of a sudden it starts to shut itself down. For the record it was working before but I don't know what happened.

The specs of the computer are amd 64 3200+, msi k8n neo 2 platinum, 1GB ram, 2 Sata hard drives. All standard xp drivers for network and nvidia system drivers. The software I have installed is utorrent and its web interface, remotely anywhere server edition, an ip update tool for dynamic ip addresses and thats it.

Any idea of why this is happening.

[guest]

The Windows Home Server software licensing service will force Windows Home Server to shut down after an hour if you do something that violates the license. Specifically joining Windows Home Server to an Active Directory Domain is one thing that will do this.

To rule out the license server, check the even log via the administrator's desktop for license service entries.

Did it do a 'graceful' shutdown? Or was it a sudden reboot/crash?

[guest]

This really sounds like a hardware failure of some sort.



If it were a licensing violation (e.g. if you had joined your home server to a Domain) you would see event log entries from the Licensing Service indicating the reason.



In the past I have diagnosted HW problems like this. Things that helped:

•Use a memory tester such as memtest86 (http://memtest86.com/) or the one available from Microsoft (http://oca.microsoft.com/en/windiag.asp).
•Replace your power-supply. A bad power supply can cause spontaneous reboots like this *and* can damage your hardware. Power supplies are cheap, but don't buy a cheap one <g>. Remember HDD's suck juice. I wouldn't use anything less than a 400w PS with 4 drives. I'm not going to recommend specific mfg. names, but just buy the good ones, ok?
•Verify your fans are all working, especially your CPU fan.
•Verify the thermal paste between your CPU heatsink and CPU was installed properly.
•Update your BIOS & drivers.
Hope this helps...