booting kernel hang
 

Hello, for some time now I have had problems when booting Redhat Linux distros such as fedora all the way back to 7.2 on my linux box(havent tryed others). Eather clean installs or upgrades doesnt make a difference. What happens is it likes to hang on startup were its booting the kernel.
Example here:
http://pc-geeks.com/DSC00073.JPG

I Cant figure out for the life of me what is causing it. Its very random and I have to hit the reset button sometimes once or sometimes up to about 5 times for the computer to boot past that part.

Hardware I have is :
AMD Athlon 800mhz Sot A cpu
GA-7IXE motherboard
440MB PC 133 RAM
S3 8MB ViRGE/VX PCI Video Card
Linksys Network Everywhere Fast Ethernet 10/100 model NC100 PCI
Intel Ethernet Pro 100 PCI
hda: QUANTUM FIREBALL TM3840A 3.6GB
hdb: Maxtor 2R015H1 14GB
Toshiba 16X DVD-Rom
250WATT ATX PSU
The /boot partition is located on the quantum drive and / partition on the maxtor drive. The Quantum drive is the master on the first ide cable in the system with the maxtor set as the slave.


I should also mention both 2.4 and 2.6 kernels make no difference. Does anyone have any ideas? Thanks.

As bizarre as it sounds, I'd say:

1) check your cables. It's possible that the IDE cable is loose and it takes that many tries for the PC to get a clean signal where it can actually read the drives properly.

2) consider getting a new PSU of higher capacity. You've got a lot of stuff running on just 250Watts, maybe it's making things difficult to initialize all at once.

Did you always have 440MB of memory? How do you even have 440 MB of memory (meaning, what is that in terms of sticks... )? I'm not getting any reasonable combination of memory that comes out to 440 MB, and maybe that's not a good thing. Mismatched memory often can cause problems, even if the memory itself is good.

Does RH run properly when you are finally able to get into it?

I thought that this could have been the problem awhile back and I decided to try using different cables with my drive by swaping out. I had some nice new ata133 compatible cables lying around. Even after swaping leaving it go for a couple of boots still same results.

I have suspected my power supply also but I have no real way to test it to see if its good. I cant rember were I got the psu but I think it came out of a P2/P3 Erra Gatway system that was gutted out and tossed. Thing Is i seem to recall hooking up my 350 Watt Sparkle psu in there for awhile(wich belongs to my standard desktop) and I got the same results.
I hope its not the psu as I no longer have any spare cash because its gone to a laptop on the way.

Well I said I have 440MB of Ram because at the time I had it booted and was looking at phpsysinfo wich reported 439.3MB so I made an estimate. I do have mismatched brand pairs in there I believe some Kingston and Some HP Stuf(not sure what they use). I cant realy tell for sure untill Can get home and open up the case and go through the three sticks of what size, module number, and brand they are.

Anyways I recently ran Memtest86+ on this computer and it passed flawlessly after a 6 hour test. But I rember awhile Back I had 512MB with different Stick Arangement and It would hang all the time at the same spot and i could not get past it by using the reset button. Very Odd if you ask me.

Yes it runs perfectly fine although I notice when viewing PhpSysInfo that Ram usage seems to hang around 95% most of the time. I'm not sure if thats a bad thing or not.

I just downloaded Knoppix Linux and burned it to a CD today and I will be taking it home later to see If it has the same issues when booting. Its worth a shot at least. Other then that the bigest areas I think could be causing a problem is the RAM or posibly the older Quantum HD with the /boot partition on it. Anyways I shall see how it goes and report back here later. Thanks :)

I havent had a chance to open the system up and look at the three ram modules i have installed. Anyways just the other day I decided to compile the 2.6.5 kernel from source with the least amount of extra stuff installed that i dont need and compiled specificaly under the athlon/k7. Since i have been using that it has stoped hanging so far *knock on wood. Now I just have to iron out some other issues with the new kernel mostly stuff that needs to be changed around in configs and such.

whops didnt need to post again lol