Server Failure

Well, my server has been acting weird the last few weeks. Every now and then I’d come home to a black screen and a locked up computer. When I’d try and reboot I’d get kernel panics and more black screens. Not only would it kernel panic while booting from the hard drive, but it would die when I tried to boot from a liveCD. After letting it cool down for a while, it seemed to work normally again. My first assumption was bad RAM, but after running Memtest86+ and flipping bits on my RAM for 30 hours with perfectly normal results, I decided that probably wasn’t the case. I decided to try and back up the data on the hard drive before I do too much with it, but it looks like the hard drive itself may be the point of failure. I’m getting read errors from it when trying to copy the partition to another drive. Meh… looks like I’ll have to just copy the files I can off it and then reinstall Linux on a new drive. Oh well, I was still running a patched/hacked up version of Slackware 10.5, and Slackware 12.1 was released months ago. The computer has been running 24/7 for nearly two years, and I got both the computer and the hard drive used, so who knows how much actual run time they’ve had.