Wow, what a series of events.

Last night storms came through my area, and the power went out. My UPS normally keeps my two desktops powered for 5-10 minutes, and the outage was longer than that. The UPS daemon which powers down my systems wasn't configured properly, so I had to manually shutdown both desktops, which I did. Power comes back on, I begin booting the desktops again, and my AthlonXP-powered Linux fileserver is up for about 5 minutes when suddenly I get the dreaded high-low-high-low PC beep indicative of a dead fan, borked CPU, or other "uh oh" condition.

When I open the case, the HSF (Vantec Aeroflow) is super hot, and the fan is not freely spinnable. I take the fan apart and there's a piece of copper that's somehow dislodged itself from the fan's motor and caught itself so that the fan can't spin. After dislodging the copper, the fan spins freely by hand, but the motor is apparently dead, because when powered on, the fan doesn't spin. Not a good scenario for our hero.

Luckily, or so I thought, I've got a spare Athlon HSF lying around, though not the best in the world, it should get me by for a couple days. As I'm swapping it in, my power goes out again, this time for a good 5 hours. It just came back on an hour or so ago, during which time I've swapped in the new HSF, to no avail. The CPU POSTs, and I can just about get to a GRUB boot loader screen before the nasty H-L-H-L beep comes back.

Right now, my *guess* is that the fan I'm using (stolen from my idle Duron 800 box) isn't beefy enough to cool an AthlonXP 1800+. I've never had an AMD chip fail before, so I don't know if it's possible the CPU's already been damaged or not. Can an AMD CPU be damaged from overheating and still POST, or no? I'm trying to figure out whether I need to order just a replacement HSF or also a new CPU.

Also, anyone able to recommend a good, reasonably priced replacement HSF that I can order from NewEgg?

Oh, and just for added intrigue, my RAID-5 array is running in degraded mode, so if one of my drives dies during this exercise, I lose 500GB of data. Wooooooo!

Well, I'm not sure if you'll consider this reasonably priced, but I love my Zalman HSF. It seems to do the job, and looks quite impressive through my case window

Yeah, $40+ for a HSF is a bit more than I was looking to spend. I don't care about looks for something that's inside an opaque case. I just want good cooling, and something that won't break in a little over a year like the Vantec Aeroflow did.

Anyone with an answer to my other question? If the CPU passes the POST, is it highly unlikely I did any damage to it?

I suppose you won't really know about CPU damage until you get the thing booted and running. That RAID issue sounds even more pressing. Keeping your CPU happy sounds like something that's worth a few extra bucks. If you buy some fancy Zalman cooling system and it turns out your CPU is hosed, then you can always get another. At least you've got Moore's Law pushing down the prices for you...

For what it's worth, maybe the inside temp of your PC is getting high enough that it's causing other parts, like your hard drives and/or RAID controller to flake. That could explain the seemingly uncorrelated HD problems you're experiencing.

Yeah, cooling is probably an issue in the case I have. I was going for silence over temperature so I just had one case fan and the CPU fan. I just ordered the CPU fan dignan suggested along with a ThermalTake Shark case which looks like it'll be good with the cooling, and should let me spread the HDs out a little bit with the 7 3.5" drive bays. Hopefully that solves the problems at least temporarily until I can afford to drop more for a serious upgrade with bigger HDs etc.

You'll like the Zalman HSF. I just got one a month ago when I upgraded to an XP3200 and it is fantastic. My cpu runs idle at about 34C/93F. Not too bad for the fan running at 2200 RPM. The fan is a monster though. And heavy! Be prepared to pull your motherboard to install it on an AMD system. I did fry an Athlon 1300 about 2 years ago, and if I remember right it would still post, but then right after it would puke. Of course YMMV.

So I get the Zalman HSF, a very impressive unit, and the fscking thing doesn't fit. I have an ABit NF7-S v2.0 mobo, and it's got four capacitors sitting too close to the CPU. A normal HSF that clips onto the white clips underneath the CPU fits, but the Zalman uses little clip mounts that screw into the motherboard. Those fit (just barely) but then they want you to screw the clip into those, and the clip is way too wide. I can't bend the capacitors any further than I have already, and it's just a no-go. So, I guess that's going back to Newegg.

I guess if I had done some Googling, I would have found this out beforehand:

http://www.zalman.co.kr/product/cooler/7000(AB)_462MBlist_eng.htm

Crap! I'm so sorry, I should have thought about that. I remember I checked my mobo beforehand, so I was fairly confident. I think the problem that most people run into is that the fan its self hits heat sinks for some mobos' chipsets.

Sorry about that. I unfortunately don't have any more experience with heatsinks other than the Zalman and standard AMD products.

Yeah, not your fault, I really should have Googled first and purchased later. I'll just find a well-reviewed HSF on NewEgg and this time I'll triple check that it fits on the motherboard.