Well. Three brand spanking new disks later it became pretty obvious that the disk wasn't the source of the problem. Kernel panicks kept occurring. I've got no idea if it's the video card, bad memory or what so I took the disks out and put them into a new machine and rebuilt Debian, again. All works so far, with no crashes, although I've now only for 46MB of RAM to play with, and this is our test web and database server. Ouch.

- wil