Just moved from one house to another, and aparently in the process did something to damage my server. Its a P4 2.26, nothing special. However, it is giving some flaky performance, and I wanted to see if anyone here could narrow the problem down further...

First noticed when booting into a graphical interface (1024x768, onboard video card [s3 savage]) a few artifacts, just things being drawn slightly incorrectly, or garbled lines flickering in/out. So I immediately thought it was the motherboard, however, after unplugging everything, and reseating it all (with one less stick of ram [1 of 2 -- 128mb total]) it ran just fine. I figured it was the 2nd stick of ram causing problems somehow.

Soon as I stuck a 2nd stick in there, started getting kernel panics, and all sorts of ugly behavior (sometimes booting, sometimes not). Swapping sticks out lead to the same situations, sometimes it would boot, sometimes it would kernel panic...

Now, back with just 1 stick (normally 99% stable), I got KDE up and running, but sometimes it garbles, and locks up the whole box before fully loading KDM to log in. Runs stable (not crashing) without graphical interfaces (just command line), leading me to believe it would be motherboard related again...

Only things that lead me to believe it _wouldn't_ be the motherboard is the fact that I can't figure out how in the world a motherboard would get damage (bolted into a case) in the back of a truck... And beyond that, how it would be sporadically working.

I thought perhaps the CPU (it was strapped down, but maybe it bumped just enough?)...

Anyone have any ideas? Diagnostics tools to test?

Theres a few people running through the internet (through this server), so I can't run Memtest right now, but I will tonight... Anything else?

Impact

Your motherboard could easily been damaged by one big bump. There is almost no impact protection in a case. Yes, it protects other things from poking the motherboard but it does nothing to cushion any sudden impacts. I always move my computers in the back seat of the car with a seatbelt holding them in place.

I would run memtest. You can google better instruction than I can write. The basic formula is to make a dos boot disk (I use a cdrw) and put memtest on it. You can find dos boot image iso s online (freedos?) Boot to the disk and run memtest. Let it run for a couple of hours. I had a PIII machine that was acting flaky, it took a good hour before any memory test would show a problem. This was the only time I have every had a memory module fail after a month or so of burn in.

If it is not memory but is hardware there are lots of diagnostic hardware utilities out there. The good ones will require you to boot to something other than your OS (eliminates OS sourced problems, KISS).

Good Luck
Lazlow

Just did an hour and a half of memtest... 512mb of good ram, 3 successfull passes, 0 errors.

Ideas?

Maybe a full reinstall of kde? Graphics related so switch out graphics card?

Onboard graphics.... so swapping out == board replacement...
KDE was _just_ compiled within a day...

You should be able to shut off the onboard video within the bios. Temporarily installing another card will eliminate video as a problem(or expose it as the problem).

Was KDE compiled before or after the move? If before, the disk might have gotten a smack and corrupted just enough to raise caine.

Lazlow

Disk did get smacked...
its been replaced and rebuilt from scratch =P (new HD)