Bad capacitor in a Dell PowerEdge 860
The title says it all, but I'd like to share the whole story if someone else stumbles over a Dell server with a bad capacitor. This server was brought to work by my boss, it was meant to be put in our rack here and do the work it previously did at the first location. But he told me that he tested it before he left and then it didn't start. it had been running fine 2 hours earlier and had not been shut down in a long time before that. So I began looking at the server, when I plugged the power cable I could hear the fans started in idle mode, power led was blinking as in idle mode. no problems so far. I pressed the power button and I could hear the hard-drives starting up, the power led had a steady light, hard-drive led steady too and the "i" led (System status indicator) was blinking/flashing. There was nothing else, no lights in the Diagnostic indicators, as you can see from this picture: I took a copy of the data from the hard-drive before doing anything else. Then I started to debug, removed the fans to CPU and a few plastic pieces and saw the bad cap right next to th