Thanks to those who replied.
Here's an update FWIW:
I did a fresh format, a fresh partition and a fresh drive even. In fact I
laboious emoved, replaced, or reconfigured the entire system component by
component, with my system in pieces scattered all over the floor. .
By process of elimination, I have narrowed it down to either a corrupt bios,
faulty motherbopard, or one of the two cpu's is toats, I suspect a
combination of the latter two... perhaps not suprising as this was an
overclocked system - even though I have a fairly sophisticated cooling
system. Normally the CPUs run consistently between 32-40C. However, it may
have been the recent summer heat wave 2 weeks @ 100F+) that, in the end, did
me in.
Symptoms:
- GPFs and stack dumps when attempting to load windows, even from a cd boot.
- numerous cpu/apic errors in Linux (although this is not unusual in the
2.4.* kernel, even with the noapic option in lilo. However the huge number of
errors indicated that underlying process handling was abnormal).
- lack of stability. The system kept losing ide and pci components and their
resouce allocations (e.g. my cdrom and NIC)
In the end, I suspect this fault(s) have been building for some time. As
usual it is never one thing. I have also had a faulty CDROM drive to contend
with which made diagnosis more difficult.
I have reset all the bios settings back to bare defaults and declocked the
processors. Linux now works without errors (and will talk to my NIC),
although Windows still cashes during setup (just goes to show which is the
most robust underlying OS - if there was any doubt).
I can limp along this way, but I suspect the real answer is to invest in a
new mainboard, which also means a new cpu as the board is a BX chipset and
will only take a 466Mhz processor at the most.
Have anyone heard of any issues with Linux running AMD processors...
specifically the Thunderbird? Keith? I believe you have some experience in
this area?
--
burns
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