Server Won't Boot - Grey Screen of Death Strikethrough Circle

Question

My Xserve is having some serious difficulties and as a result, so am I.
To start from the beginning, I've been running a standard install of 10.5.1 for a couple of weeks now and thus far it has been smooth sailing. Last week we upgraded to 10.5.2 and some issues reared there ugly head (not saying that .2 is the cause but this was the chain of events). Firstly SMB started going skewiff, not letting users login in to shared folders, then mail stopped some services and could not be restarted.
This culminated with what seems to be a failed restart (in that i told the device to restart but didn't see it through to coming back), a weekend passed and on monday nothing was live any more. When a monitor was plugged in, all that we saw as the grey screen, apple logo and spinning gear. After sitting there for 5mins or so the display would go black, the Xserve would restart, the grey screen and spinning gear would appear, and the cycle would continue.
We were able to boot from the install dvd, but at this point we decided to call apple and get some pro advice. Based on this we tried to verify disk permissions but got an error of something like failed on exit. The apple rep wanted to go into single user mode and mount drives and run disk util from command but we got no were. To clarify we were using a two risk mirror raid and verify disk returned an all ok report.
As we were getting no ware the apple rep recommend removing on of the raid disks (to have a keep a backup) and try restoring the system from our time machine backup on an ext drive. We chose a date before we thought the issue may have developed (but not before the upgrade to 10.5.2). When this had finished and the system did its restart, the grey screen appear with the apple logo for a moment, but this would then change to a circle with a strikethrough it. We attempted another TM restore from a point before the 10.5.2 backup but got the same result.
After getting fed up with all this, we tried a fresh install (without deleting the disk partitions and re-initialising the disk) and low and behold the system started up again. Tried to do a restore from TM via the install dvd process but this set us back to our strikethrough circle problem again.
To tell you the truth, I'm so frustrated with this thing right now I'm considering sending it back!!!
Any help or thoughts would be greatly appreciated.
Nige

Answer 1

Hi mik.e245
Pop in the Install Disk 1 that came with your iMac and run disk repairs as described in the articles below:
http://kb.wisc.edu/helpdesk/page.php?id=3810
http://docs.info.apple.com/article.html?path=DiskUtility/10.5/en/duh1018.html
Not always, but many times Kernal Panic's are associated with a ram issue's. If a ram module was recently added it may have become partially dislodged/unseated and needs to be reseated.
If your still having trouble run the Hardware Test from the same install disk as per this article.
http://docs.info.apple.com/article.html?artnum=303081-en
Dennis