Dell Precision Workstation with unusual crashing events

[andyofne]

In the office I have a Dell PWS 530 running Windows 2000 Pro with a 1.8Ghz Xeon processor, 1GB of RDRAM, a Matrox G550 dual head video card, and a SCSI hard drive.

About two weeks ago the system started crashing unexpectedly.

There are no entries for the crashes in the event viewer. No message from the BIOS shows up when you restart (saying things like System shut down was caused by a thermal event), and there is no real rhyme or reason to what causes the system to shut down.

I've run the Dell Diagnostics CD on the system for literally hours and everything reported back fine. I ran memtest on the RAM and it came up clean.

I've also:

- Switched hard drives out
- Switched processor/heat sinks
- Switched video cards
- Tried to install a clean copy of Windows 2000 on a new hard disk (fails)
- Tries to install RedHat Linux on a new hard disk (fails)
- Tried removing extra devices (nothing really extra installed)
- Ordered a replacement motherboard (refurb) only to find out it was the wrong revision and doesn't support my available processors.

I cannot duplicate the shut down event either. It will some times run fine for a while and then some times it shuts down as soon as you double click on a desktop icon.

It seems to be able to stay up and running fine for hours so long as you don't touch it.

It will run in Safe Mode seemingly fine for extended periods of time. However, I can't run the applications I need to use in Safe Mode.

Right now, I'm running a SLAX live linux CD to see how long I can run the system this way.

So, to recap: the system just instantly shuts off and does not report anything , any where. There is no indication what is causing it.

Up to this point, the system has run fine for the last 4 years.

It has a mission critical application, vendor installed, that I cannot reinstall on another machine without the vendor's support.

My boss decided not to pay the annual maintenance agreement so now it will cost between $5,000 and $10,000 to get the system reinstalled or repaired through the vendor.

Has anyone ever seen a system drop dead like this?

I do not believe this is heat related because I created a 'heat' situation and the system shut down BUT posted a message on reboot saying "The system was shut down due to a thermal event". I do not see this message when the system crashes 'normally'.

If you can think of any other tests I can run before I get the replacement motherboard next week, I'll likely try whatever you can suggest.

Thank you, that is all.