I bought a refurbished/used Dell Poweredge 840 from a reseller over the internet. Since buying it i have installed a raid card, added 4 hard drives, installed server 2008 standard, and have used the system sparingly. I have kept the server unplugged from the outlet for several months. Since I did not activate server 2008 it more than likely has expired.
What is interesting is that the server initially turned on today with a blue light but after some time....started giving me an amber light. At first I could get to the boot screen of server 2008 but it would restart the server. Then I popped in the server 2008 standard disc and it would not go into the install mode, instead it seemed to perform a boot into the os on the hard drive. I was able to log in and see my files. The time seemed accurate. I went to system and checked the activation status and I basically have a day to activate.
So I decided to delete my raid 5 array and start over in quick init mode. This time I pop in the disc for 2008 standard and I eventually get a bsod error 0x00000124. So it looks like something has bugged in the hardware but I am not sure what to do. I just bought the server so many months ago and had no problems with installing the raid card and the os........... Any help would be greatly appreciated.