BSD machine fixed!

So, I swapped a known working motherboard into the BSD machine.  It now works.  I also decided to use a quad core AMD AM2+ CPU that I had sitting around.  That's all I changed.

I'd originally thought the problem was related to the hard disk.  So, I decided the night before to disconnect the drives (it has two SATA drives), to determine if it were the real issue.  It still experienced the same symptoms after boot-up attempts, which told me it wasn't a hard disk issue.  I also swapped out the RAM with a known working chip with the same results when trying to boot-up.

So, either the the old CPU (a dual-core AMD...I forget the model) died or something on the motherboard died (or maybe there was a short somewhere?).  I left it running a live instance of Linux Mint, just to see if it stays stable over the next 24 hours.

Next, I need to reinstall FreeBSD (wondering if I should try some others as well, such as OpenBSD or Mint).  I wiped the drive, thinking that there was some corruption issue...shouldn't have done that.

BSD machine still not fixed; Slackware bullet-proof as usual...

So, I've had some time to play with my Slackware install.  I should actually upgrade to the latest, but I think I might try to get that BSD system back up this weekend.  I did upgrade firefox on the Slack machine, though...it was running a VERY old version (v2.x.x, I believe).  I'm running v12.0 now via my regular user account.

I'm tempted to install phpBB3 onto this machine (that's why I want to get into that BSD box...I'd just installed phpBB3 and had a very nice site that contained all my system and sysadmin notes that I've collected over the years...been using that software as a data repository since 2003 or so, on a very old system that runs phpBB2).

I've no real plans this weekend or maybe even the next (no autocross scheduled until next weekend and I'm opting out of that).  That should give me time to delve into the BSD issue as well as wiping the replacement system and installing the latest Slack.