[dihhuit]

"This will take a while" is probably the understatement of the century. The last time I did this, it was like 5+ hours. If anything is going to drive me to sell this thing, it will be waiting for the disc to exercise again...

That being said, there're a lot of good suggestions in there, jan-jaap, so thank you. I'm running the ide.IP30 now, but one update I do want to provide is that last night when I pulled the mobo to reseat it again for the n+1th time, I noticed that the Heart heatsink was loose. :/ All four screws needed to be tightened. That may not be THE issue, but I'm sure an overheating Heart would cause all manner of fun problems.

As ide.IP30 runs, I notice that it does say "This test takes approximately 12 minutes on a good dual processor machine with 128MB memory and MXI graphics." It also detects both of my cards correctly. Are you sure it doesn't exercise graphics? If it didn't why would the graphics card be called out in the printed time estimate?

If this doesn't get me anywhere, I'll pull one of the graphics cards, exercise the whole disc (I guess I could use a warm noisy office for the rest of the day), and try again.

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Ok, it's done. And I get some weird results that point to maybe it is a graphics issue after all. Before the test starts, it detects both graphics cards, but at the end of the test, it says "No graphics boards detected" which is hilarious, because that's printed to the screen. Also my mouse is now frozen. Keyboard still works though, so poking around in the ide program I noticed that there are extended tests. Running those now. Says they'll take 25 minutes (2x as long, but it only took maybe 5 minutes for the regular ones).