Random Musings

Now that I’m moved, and I’m starting to get settled in, finally, I setup some computers tonight.

• Well, my gaming/desktop computer worked fine (actually, haven’t booted Linux on it, yet, but Windows is fine.)
• My old webhost/server box is up fine, as well.
• Unfortunately, my primary NFS/file server won’t boot.

I get a fun variety of errors:

• Sometimes, I get a recursive fault and the kernel locks (2.6.16, though, I’m not sure it matters)
• Sometimes, I get a “failed to mount /dev/md4, please specify root fs with root=” (etc/paraphrased)
• Sometimes, I get a crc error during “Uncompressing Linux”
• Sometimes, I get an “Invalid format” during “Uncompressing Linux”
• Sometimes, I get partway into boot and a beautiful screen full or random colors and letters flashes, and the machine reboots.

Given how inconsistent the failures are, my gut says “motherboard, ram or CPU”, and not harddrive.  (I did really expect at least one harddrive to fail, though.)

The case for this machine did get a nice dent added to it during the move (on the motherboard side, not the other side).

I think I need to make a DSL boot USB key, and see if that fixes it, just to confirm, otherwise, debugging this is going to be a pain.  Damn fileserver shouldn’t be the broken machine.