Yes. Unconnect the old drive for a while. I've had problems with drives that periodically lock up the entire machine even when that drive was not actually being used.
Thanks for the suggestions, last night I took the box apart and reseeded everything (there is only a NIC and a video card though) and re-plugged in all cables. Took out the bad drive and rebooted. It worked through the night, this morning I ran VNC remote desktop for about 15 minutes and it choked. It must be the video card. I'm assuming that the video card is involved even when running remote desktops.
Maybe it only works when it needs to, and maybe its just full of dirt and won't turn. Give it a nudge and see if it will start. A new vid card may be in order - get one without a fan. Fans go bad way too often.
Run an exhaustive memory test on this machine for several hours. You may have ram with intermitant failures.
See if you can get lmsensors package working to measure the temp and voltages of the system. If you have a spare power supply hook it up (you don't have to go thru a full install, just cable it in with the cover off for a day or two to see if it still fails).
I'm presumeing an ATX power supply and motherboard connection here... Notice the larger capacitors on the mobo near where the atx power supply connects. If any of them have bulgeing ends, and perhaps leakage, that means your mobo is dieing. This is fairly common on slot 1 mobos of a certain vintage, namely just about the time the P3-500mhz cpus came out. Under rated power section on the mobo. Do-Over.
It's a PIII 1Ghz with ATX. It's only powering a HD, floppy, CDROM, NIC, AGP and two extra fans. Power supply problems wouldn't surprise me though. I notice that when I plug the power cord in, it make a few faint crackling sounds. I think the first thing I'll try is just getting a low-end video card. Thanks, Josh