[ILUG] "Kernel Panic" update

[Michael Treacy]

Many thanks to those of you who made suggestsions, etc.

Went in this morning, original CD's in hand to run a rescue disk. Duly 
installed the CD, and got the same message again.

Went poking around inside the pc, 'cos it was making a bit of a racket to 
discover that the fan on the cpu was shot (smell of dead electric circuit 
off it) - noise was from the power supply fan.

So, I swapped the dead fan for a working one - no joy.

Swapped the cpu (thinking that the cpu was dead also) - no joy (in fact, 
even less joy than before). I used to have a Pentium 200, and the one I put 
in was a P200MMX - it was the only one I could find that would fit the 
motherboard.

Managed to get my hands on a new Dell PC which hadn't been used yet and 
swapped the harddrive out from the server and put it into the Dell PC.

Powered it up and it loaded, sort of. I normally get it to default to the 
graphical login, but it hung at the point where the graphical login starts. 
I guess this was because the Dell PC has a graphics card which the linux 
system wasn't set up to handle. So, at least I know that the hard drive is 
safe.

Which leads me to the conclusion that the board is shot. The only thing I 
didn't check was the memory, but since it passed the memory test at the 
startup, I figured that was probably ok.

Which gave me every excuse to go to my boss and tell her that I needed a new 
server altogether. So, I've just ordered one will all the bells and whistles 
needed - 1GB RAm, 2 x 120GB drives, RAID, etc, etc.

New toy should be arriving within a few days. Now my only job is to lie low 
and keep a bunch of pc-starved students off my back till then!!

Mike

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