Xserve (2008) keeps crashing

[bradmclaughlin]

Hi, my company is running an Xserve that I inherited from the previous guy in my position.

During the day today, the server crashed on me about once every 30-45 minutes. I think it's due to heavy use, but it's unknown. I looked around the crash logs and couldn't find anything from today, but I did find a hang report in the DiagnosticReports folder.

Just to start diagnosing today, I sat by the server for a little bit to listen for any weird noises or whatever to figure out when it was crashing. I heard the fans get really loud and then it rebooted.

The weird thing is, when it reboots itself, the Server Admin app won't relaunch and the system needs to be rebooted again (you'll see that in the hang report).

Any one out there have any ideas?

Hang report attached.

 

[Consultant]

Clone your drive to another drive and try from that drive?

 

[aarond12]

I don't see anything in the log that is a smoking gun. I have to agree with Consultant -- this could be a disk drive issue. Try running an application to check the SMART status of your drives. If that doesn't show anything, try cloning your system to an external USB hard drive and booting from that. It will be slow (this is only for testing purposes!), but it will let you see if the drive is the issue.

 

[gnasher729]

I don't see anything in the log that is a smoking gun. I have to agree with Consultant -- this could be a disk drive issue. Try running an application to check the SMART status of your drives. If that doesn't show anything, try cloning your system to an external USB hard drive and booting from that. It will be slow (this is only for testing purposes!), but it will let you see if the drive is the issue.

With a five year old computer, disk drive is indeed a good possibility, and fortunately very cheap to fix.

 

[Les Kern]

can't boot an XServe from an external drive.
Sounds like it is drive related though. Best bet is to add another drive, do a clean install then migrate over. passwords will need to be reset, but if you have few users it will be a snap.

 

[rlkarren]

can't boot an XServe from an external drive.

Actually, you CAN boot an Xserve from an external drive or other Mac computer in target mode. It must be over firewire and the OS version must be compatible with the XServe. I have done it frequently.

I'll 2nd or 3rd or 4th the failing drive hypothesis. At least that's where I would start. It could simply be a software corruption too. I have had both and both displayed similar symptoms. My fix was to re-install the Server OS and migrate settings from the old drive or from a backup.

Before you do *anything though, backup, backup, backup...