I’ve had an Xserve G4 1.33dp for roughly three years now and it has given me much trouble. I’ve written of it here and elsewhere. Random, complete system lock-ups, data corruption, random system restarts, you name it. I’ve done everything I, and everybody else, could think of. I took it to Apple while it was still under warranty. They checked it out and gave it a clean bill of health. Same problems. I ran memtest. Nothing. I put new RAM in just in case. No change. I opened it and reseated everything that could be reseated. I did the voodoo scsi dance of death around it.
To make a long, very painful, story short, it turns out it was the CDROM drive and interface cable. I don’t know why it didn’t show up the first time I took it in, but it finally got to the point where it wouldn’t boot. I ordered and installed a new CDROM drive. Still couldn’t get it to work. Took it back to the good folks at Apple and they diagnosed it. I guess it was bad in a way that made the system think it was good. My hunch is perhaps a few files didn’t get copied correctly during installation from the CDs.
I’m not smart enough to tell you how to test your server for this particular problem; I just thought I would post this so if you are at the end of your proverbial rope, it might give you something to go on.
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