I have a machine that has been running fine for the last few years as a home server and now it has problems with freezing and restarting continuously.
I want to figure out what the problem is with the machine.
The specs are:
- AMD Sempron CPU
- 2GB RAM
- Windows 2000 Server
- 20GB HDD (C:)
- 2x 250GB HDDs in Raid 1 configuration (D:)
It's hard to diagnose the problem from within Windows because the machine could restart of freeze at any time.
I've run Memtest86 from a bootable CD and that worked fine - no errors after 13 hours and 11 passes, but trying to boot from an Ubuntu live CD didn't work when I tried it. It halted with a text dump screen of some sort displaying the IP and some memory addresses (can't quite remember exactly what was one there).
Is there some program I can run from a bootable CD that will diagnose the problem and tell me which piece of hardware is faulty?
What can I do to quickly diagnose the problem?
Update
I finally repaired the machine. Although the PSU had tested ok with the PSU tester, a few days later when swapping out the motherboard it blew up with a pop and a cloud of sparks and smoke.
I replaced the blown PSU with an Antec EarthWatts 500W PSU and was able to get the system functioning.
The graphics card was also a bit dodgy so I ordered in a second hand replacement.
So in summary, I replaced the following parts:
- PSU
- Motherboard
- AGP graphics card
and was able to get the machine running. The system test software that I used was unable to detect the faulty hardware. Luckily before hooking up the SATA drives I did a backup because setting up RAID on the new motherboard wrecked the data. I had to fiddle around with drivers and Windows to get everything working correctly.