Hmm, I think my linux box (which I've had for about 2.5 years) has croaked. Perhaps someone here can help me figure out exactly what the root cause is, without having to try each component manually in a working machine.

Relevant hardware:

Motherboard: ASUS P5AD2-E Premium (Proactive ai Series)
Graphics Card: GV-NX62TC128D (basically nVidia GeForce 6200)
Case/Power: COOLER MASTER CAV-T01-WWC Silver/Blue Aluminum ATX Mid Tower Computer Case 380W Power Supply

My suspicion is the Motherboard, but it MIGHT be the graphics card... Hell, it might be the RAM...


Symptoms and stuff:

1) Background:

- This box wasn't constantly on... I would turn it off when not using (hey, I saw a NOTICEABLE difference in my electric bill during the summer).

- For most of my ownership of it, I had Debian on it, and it was rock solid, but many pieces were disabled (e.g. the hardware accelerated graphics, sound, etc. - all stuff I didn't need or feel like being bothered with).

- Recently, I decided to nuke it and install Ubuntu 7.10 (gutsy), and try to get everything to work.

- On an unrelated note, I thought it was weird that when I let it do what it wanted with my hard drive, it kinda didn't seem to create a separate swap partition, but I trust it knows what it's doing with the default partitioning scheme).


2) Initial issues:

- When I turned on the proprietary 6200 drivers, I noticed that Compiz was being very slow. Like, really slow. I'm not 100% sure what I did... I think I might have installed a package or something, and it PARTIALLY helped... When I had it finally "working", it was still very slow when first loading X... but then when I switched to TTY1 and back to TTY7, it auto-fixed itself every time.

- Every now and then, if I left it there, it would lock up during screen saver (like, I'd find the screensaver frozen on the screen, and there was nothing to do). I had to hard boot it.


3) More serious issues

It really quickly reached a point where it wouldn't ever fully boot up. It sometimes gets farther than other times:

- Sometimes, it gets to the "Ubuntu progress bar while booting splash screen thing"

- Sometimes it doesn't even get to the GRUB loader...

- One time, I actually got a "Failed CPU overclocking" type error

- Sometimes, it doesn't even get anywhere (hit power, it turns on, nothing happens)

- One time, I went into the BIOS to look around, and after a while of going through it, it gave me 2 short beeps (and then kept chugging along). It did this once or twice before locking up.



SO then... here is the list of possibilities:

- Motherboard is fried
- (unlikely) CPU is horked
- Video card is misbehaving
- RAM is hosed
- Power supply is too weak for the higher-power combination I've got going, with the video card drivers enabled (??)
- Power supply has dust in it or something and it's causing it to be too weak hehe


I need your help to find a good, systematic way of eliminating the possibilities.

- I have yet to look under the hood and empty a can of compressed air into the various fan blow holes (never know, it's been a couple of years).
- I'm thinking the CPU possibility can be eliminated right away, cause I probably wouldn't even get to POST if it were the case.
- I think I have an old copy of Memtest sitting around somewhere that I can use to check the ram.
- I also want to take a very close look at the power requirements of all the components, and whether my supply is just not good enough (but I highly doubt that - I was careful to get a good motherboard and good power supply, IIRC).

Does anyone know any good diagnostic tool that is bootable, or can help check the remaining pieces and eliminate various possibilities?

cheers!