raq2 bootproblems

[Janko Knops <polthemol@home.nl>]

My raq2 had some rather weird problems booting up after a powersurge, so 
 I decided to give it a clean install.

I've put up a bootserver (nfs) as described in the cyrius.com-guide. All 
works well, till I reached the point where I wanted to let the raq2 boot 
the installer. It keeps on giving weird hangups, on completely different 
places.

I started swapping several hardware to find the problem and my findings 
while doing this are:

- no harddisk attached --> doesn't even startup
- 1 strip of 32 MB ram --> boots with 16 MB
- 2 strips of 32 MB ram --> boots sometimes with 32 MB
- 1 strip in second slot --> boots with 16 MB
- other harddisk attached --> doesn't boot at all
- booting the original debian installed on it --> hangs up in normal 
mode when checking the harddisk, in recoverymode just while trying to 
load the image en the old linux gets a kernel panic straight away

I've managed twice to get the installer to load, but there it just hangs 
up completely.

The raq isn't getting very hot (except for the harddisk, but that has a 
pretty good cooling with 2 small fans blowing straight over it).

Now I'm wondering if it could be perhaps some faulty memory, or a busted 
ide controller, or something like that. Because the results don't make 
any sence to me since they occure pretty random.

And is there a way that I can netboot memtest ?

Thanks in advance for the help,

Janko