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!