Yes, I do mean it, finally!
This is because now I know what has caused the server hangs lately. Smartd reported an “Offline_Uncorrectable” sector and the RAID on IDE disks does not respond nicely to sector errors. Now the sector has been marked dead, and the raid is synced again, plus I know which disk has caused the problems.
I am looking forward to the move of server, cause the other server has SCSI disks and they are more stable. Still there is more to do before I can migrate but it is on my roadmap. At least I feel confident that one more problem has been solved!