In 2003, I bought both a Powerbook G4 as well as a Shuttle XPC which was semi-hand-built (semi in the sense that the Shuttle machines already come configured with a lot of options and one only has to had a CPU, HDD, RAM, CDROM, etc.)
My Powerbook gets daily use as my personal machine. I hadn't booted my Shuttle in probably... a year?
So today I hauled it out of the box, configured it with a monitor, keyboard, mouse, and tried to get it going. No luck. 2-3 hrs of chkdsk, Windows Restore, and lots of other crap, and nothing. It was running fine when I boxed it up, but today I got errors which basically meant that I had to reinstall Windows. That's fine because I have my data on the D drive. So I reinstalled Windows. Cue another 1-2 hrs for that, plus installing some drivers from Shuttle. Now it doesn't recognize the mouse or keyboard, nor the Ethernet.
I'm ready to junk this thing. I just need to delete the data on the HDD.
I'm not sure why I wanted to try to use the Shuttle. It was a waste of much of my Sunday. I won't make that mistake again. My next computer will be a new Powerbook to replace my G4.
get yourself a MacBook. don't spend 33% more money for smth that you don't need.
Hard drives these days seem to be pretty flakey unless they're exercised.
I had a similar experience but with an iPod and a firewire drive. I used them when I first bought them, didn't touch them for a few years as I was using a different music player (and as the first drive filled up) and they're dead or full of errors (bad sectors, read errors) when I try starting them up again.
Paul- I'm partial to the keyboard on the MBP. I also like the additional real estate of the MBP. I know the Macbook is great but I'm going to stick with the MBP.
You could install Linux on the shuttle and use it as a small server around your house. Will it take another drive? Go grab the biggest drive you can and use it to store movies and music or whatever. You can install mt-daapd on it and have it serve up music that appears as a shared library in iTunes...
Since Your system went unused for more than a year the lithium battery keeping Bios alive is more than probably depleted and should be replaced.
This could ressucitate Your Shuttle XPC motherboard.
Regards
Serge