Every 2-3 days a crash

Question

We had a power surge one day, and it seems that after it, everything has gone to heck with my dual G5 in which i'm using as a file server. Ever since then, i have been getting kernel panics, and after them, the OS won't boot. So i have been reinstalling the OS from the dual layer DVD i have od Leopard server. It runs fine for a few days, then it crashes. At first, i thought it was a Lacie firewire 800 card i had installed, so i removed that, but it still happened a few days later. Then i throught it was my firewire 800 drive i had plugged in, removed that, reinstalled the OS, and it worked for a few days until the point i'm at now. I was transferring files over my home network to the 3TB hard drive i have in it, and then about an hour later, the computer crashes and reboots itself. I came down to check on it, and it was at the apple start screen with the spinning wheel. It then rebooted itself 3x until it froze at the spinning wheel again for minutes.
I then tried again to boot, except with the OS DVD in, and it actually was able to boot to the desktop, I tried to open the crash report, but that crashed for some reason. I then went into Onyx to test the drive, and it said that the verification failed, and to reboot with the OS DVd to fix them. I'm in the process of verifying the disk permissions, but it doesn't seem to be going anywhere, and then gives a kernel panic. So what could this mean?
Is my boot hard drive bad? Like, what can cause a kernel panic to not allow the computer to boot again? It seems like this keeps happening when i write to the drive from a rmeote location, but not on the computer itself. And when i access the files through my LAN, just reading them, there's never a problem. Before that power surge in the house, I had it running without a problem for about 6 months. The only difference now is that i updated to security update 2011-004 when before i didn't. Could that be a factor too?
If anyone could shed some light on this, it would be great.

Answer 1

This has all the hallmarks of bad RAM. It is weird that a power surge would only manifest itself in the RAM, but I suppose not impossible.  It is especially noteworthy that you are getting KPs when booted from the Leopard disc. This says to me that you have hardware issue not related to your hard drive, and the most likely culprit is RAM.
If you can get the thing booted, try downloading and running a few tests with Rember (free, donationware).  It is a memory testing tool that iteratively loops through all your RAM to smoke out bad addresses.  Or you could just try removing all your RAM DIMMs and re-introducing them one-by-one to find the bad RAM...
Good luck!
Andrew