Ops-Normal.org

The whole of the north east of Scotland from Inverness to Aberdeen to Montrose lost power an hour ago - 382 postcodes. It's back on okay now. I was out so couldn't shut down the two PCs on UPS. The UPS did its stuff I presume until the batteries discharged and the PCs both shut down. One is okay but when I started the PC that runs my weather station website it failed to boot. BIOS doesn't recognise it has a hard drive, just a CD-ROM. Bugger, bugger, bugger! Fortunately I back up twice daily so have all the info up until 1000 today. Look like a new hard drive is required.....

Don't give up yet.

Panic over. Remembered I had a surplus hard disk in a drawer. Took the sides off the PC to remove the existing hard disk. The HDD power cable didn't seem as tight as it should be. Pushed it in hard. Did 3 Hail Marys. Powered up and it all works. Somehow the shock of a sudden shut down must have been just enough to loosen the plug finally - it hasn't been touched for at least 4 years. An odd timing coincidence - it could have happened at any time.

Cograts on averted crisis!
Don't you love simple solutions for potentially expensive and/or time consuming tasks?

PP

Six shortish breaks in our urbanisation Monday evening, one Tuesday evening. Reclosers causing very ragged reconnections but nothing damaged.

Love simple solutions.
Had severe storms last weekend and many areas, including ours, lost power, so obviously no broadband phone or internet. We were lucky and had power back in 24 hours, but still no internet. Of course, some NBN cables were down, but the modem has a sim card so that it can switch to the cell phone network. Which it didn't.

Did the thing that every help desk asks if you've done, switched it off and on. Came back on straight away, even though the nearest cell phone tower was damaged, so we had a weaker signal.