Linux Strangeness
My server decided to die on me. Two of my hard drives failed at the same time (luckily on different raid arrays) and since they were on the same raid controller, I reached the logical conclusion that the raid controller was dead. I bought another one at a local computer store for way too much money, and it didn’t work. The Linux kernel would hang during boot; not a kernel panic, but a hang. At this point I started to think that it was a software problem because both raid cards used the same chipset (VT6421). I downgraded 2 kernels and tried to boot again. This time the computer would boot and see all the hard drives, but after a couple of minutes, the computer would become unresponsive. After a couple of days of testing in my limited amount of spare time, I decided that at least 1 PCI slot on my motherboard is dead. Now it’s back up and running, hopefully for a long time.