[ale] OT: Diagnosing HW problem

[jb at sourceillustrated.com (John Wells)]

Guys,

More hardware woes.  The same box I placed a new harddrive in last week
has taken to freezing up for no apparent reason.  After freezing, it
typically won't boot up...it'll get through POST and then just go blank.

After a number of reboots, it'll play just fine and boot up again, only to
freeze in the next 30 minutes or so.

I just rebooted it, and instead of normal POST sequence received a mix of
normal POST messages and garbled text, then freeze before boot.

I'm thinking bad motherboard (currently a three year old Gigabyte
GA-7VRX), but would love to hear opinions from the group.

It's worth noting the system was rock solid before adding the drive.

Thanks,
John