install freeze w/ trigger-happy softraid

Hey, newbie here, I had major freezes very early in the CD install process (kbd dead, no log, PC has no serial) because of mistaken softraid detection. It happened on exceptionally crappy hardware: a Dell Vostro 200 w/ Intel "rapid storage RAID", i.e. latest BIOS is still old. BIOS UI has only

stresstest + safest crashlog?

I've had a bunch of crashes freezing one PC to such an extent I couldn't recover any log, switch tty, ssh from outside and the machine has no serial port. What's the surest way to get a crashlog? syslog to a 2nd PC, a USB key with log-cow, buy a PCI serial port card? Is there a stress script t