The Poweredge 1950 and 2950 are seriously old hardware. I would not be surprised if you had bulging capacitors on the PCI riser card. This can quickly result in a server that powers off unexpectedly or even refusing to POST. These were great servers back in the day, but are quickly becoming unreliable simply due to aging capacitors. If this is just a test/lab machine, you could just replace the caps in the riser card with equivalent units to keep the server usable. The problematic card looks like this: http://www.techpartswarehouse.com/media/images/DE-H6188_wm.jpg and if hyou have the newer riser card inside like this: http://www.itinstock.com/ekmps/shops/itinstock/images/dell-poweredge-2950-pci-e-riser-card-with-bracket-h6183-0h6183-34767-p.jpg it will not have the issues I described. I believe the good riser comes with the PE 2950 v3 (2950 III)
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