I am seeing some very unstable behavior which I am trying to track down, and I would really really appreciate some input...
Here is what I am seeing on this machine: Slink install, SMP kernel 2.0.36 Asus P2B-D MB, 2 PIII/450, 256M ram (2 PC100 128M DIMMs) IBM 14GXP 14.6G drive, UDMA disabled (part of test...) Stable for some time, then suddenly you name it, it crashed. I have also attempted to run the slink installed kernel (single processor,etc), and see similar results. One test I perform to see a failure is to move a file from my /home to /tmp gunzip file.gz; gzip file; gzip -t file.gz I run this loop anywhere from 5 to 20 times, no problems, but eventually, I will get a bad crc. This tells me that I am headed for trouble. On some reboots, I get a mess of errors, others no problem. Netscape 4.61 runs great, or crashes before a window is even drawn. Lots of segfaulting, or stable operation for a while. I have JUST upgraded to slink, and at the same time upgraded to this new MB with lots of memory, and a new hard drive. SO, I am attempting to isolate the problem. I was suspicious that this drive (7200 RPM, UDMA) was either overheating crammed between a floppy and a sparq drive (so I moved it in my case) or failing due to some UDMA problems (so I disabled UDMA in bios). I disabled MPS 1.4 support in the bios. I installed kernel 2.2.1 from the stable slink (r2?) from a debian site (original install from lsl cds, BTW). I still see weird behavior. I have noticed, though, that my aging power supply sometimes needs some coaxing to power up from shutdown (perhaps fluxuating power supply problems?), or it could be a marginal memory cell/row/column/chip. I have had the memory almost filled up with tons of stuff running, with no problems, but who knows. Does anyone have any experience with this sort of flakiness? I grabbed memtest from a link on freshmeat.net and built it, and am about to explore that, I have a fan blowing right on the board in case it was overheating in some way, and I am running out of other ideas... Any input greatly appreciated! Thanks Dan Hugo