Over the past decade, I have written many times about my home network and its backbone Windows Home Server. Built upon a HP MediaSmart server, this machine has saved the day more than once as I once wrote about here. Over the years, my home network has expanded 
with the addition of Roku devices and computer upgrades, but the core of the network has always been the Windows Home Server. The little 9X5X9 inch Server ( in blue in the attached diagram) housed all of my music, photos and videos. It backed up every computer in the house daily. It was my security blanket. But as the expression goes: you don’t know what you got until it’s gone.
About 10 days ago, I noticed that the home server was off. This was unusual because this machine runs 24/7 and you can count on both hands the number of the times the machine has been off in the past 10 years. I turned it back on and started reading its event log. It turns out that that were a bunch of things going bad at the same time. The primary system disk reported it was failing and the CPU was running hot enough to cause the machine to shut down.
Fortunately, one of the first things I did when I got my server was to establish monthly backups of the server itself. I turned the machine off again and pulled out the server back up drive. It was readable on my Windows 10 machine so I knew all my data was safe. After I removed that server backup disk, the server wouldn’t come back on. The server power supply was dead and I was almost in tears.
There is a happy ending to this tale of woe and I’m about to cut to the chase. The 200 watt power supply for the MediaSmart Server is hard to 
find because of its odd size and single cable. I did find a new one on EBay (from MIXPC2000) which fit perfectly and is a quiet 350 watt monster. I installed the replacement system hard drive and after many unsuccessful attempts finally got the software reinstalled (more about that maybe in a another post). Installing the server software took an hour (after I was able to get it going), installing ten years of software updates took 3 hours and it took 20 hours for the server to rebuild all of the files (tombstones) and be able to present them for use.
The Server is back where it belongs, serving up files and backing up the home computers. I am relieved that it is functioning and hope to get another 10 years out of this box.