Hello,

Today my washing machine completely broke down. My parents desperately tried to get it working, but it resulted in the circuit breakers tripping and my server (an old Dell Wyse thin client) experiencing a hard power off.

When I tried to turn it back on, I received these errors on the screen.

I ran a memtest, and it completed without any issues. I also created a disk image backup just in case.

Is there any chance of getting this machine running again, or is it only fit for utilization?

  • @[email protected]
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    16 months ago

    That’s weird. It’s getting as far as Linux, so hopefully you have a backup you can restore and everything will be fine. If not, you can probably still pull your data off and reinstall.

    Also, usually thin clients have eMMC chips instead of SSDs. Those are designed for low write lifetimes. I would be very cautious about trusting any important data to them, especially if you’re not monitoring their health.

    • My Password Is 1234OP
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      16 months ago

      Unfortunately, I didn’t have a backup, but I still managed to recover ALL the important files from this server, even with half of the file system sectors damaged. God, thank you. This is another lesson for the future to regularly make backups!

      • @[email protected]
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        16 months ago

        Really, so there was filesystem corruption? I’d definitely check the health of that eMMC chip if you can.

        • My Password Is 1234OP
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          16 months ago

          So, the flash memory wasn’t built into the terminal, it was a 2.5-inch SSD drive that I yanked out of its plastic case to fit into the terminal’s SATA slot.

          Once unplugged it, I dumped the disk image using the dd command onto my computer, and then I worked on that image to recover the data.

          • @[email protected]
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            16 months ago

            Oh, that’s fine then. Though you should still have monitoring on drive health, or backups if you don’t care when exactly it dies.