A more HW question - computer is freezing
 

I have some major issues with one of my boxes, that is running slackware 12 an winxp, but the problem occures on both operating systems. The computer freezes after few minutes of uptime. Everything is stopped then, networking(Can't ping or connect through ssh on that local machine), sound is stopped, but the output on monitor just stands there. And nothing can be done except reboot. And after reboot same goes over and over again.

While BIOS is booting the machine up and detecting IDE drivers I get a message:
Secondary IDE Channel is missing 80 conductor cable.
Or something like that. But both IDE cables are ok, on the primary master(disk) and on the secondary master(dvd-rw) are ok.
The most major change before these problems was running a winxp image over the existing instalation and installing slackware 12 from scratch.

And one other failure that I discovered was that one fans cable was a bit torn, resting near the disk. It was a 5V cable, could this cable have caused severe injuries to the disk? Or is this a RAM problem? Anyone have any idea?

Could have been the cable indeed, when i had about the same problem my PSU wasnt giving enough power so i would get random crashes and some hardware not working, might wanna check that.

Maybe find some disk-health programm to see if youre drive is corrupted some how.

Sounds to me like a heat problem, especially if one fan might not be working.
Which fan belongs to the torn cable? Are all your fans working?

Fan was the left side case fan. Now it is removed from the box.
It's not overheating, I thought this as well, but I opened up the box and try the temperatures of CPU, SouthBridge and Disk. All we're normal. Warm but not hot, and BIOS doesn't show heat over 45˚C ever.
All other fans are working ok, PSU, Disk, CPU, Case back, Case front.

Power Supply Unit, it might me. Well now today it's working from 9 or 10am, and now it's 1pm here.

Well the IDE cable could be a little hard as it complains of a Secondary IDE channel, and on secondary is only the dvd-rw unit with has not been used in about a month now.

Have you tried replacing the battery on the motherboard?

BIOS keeps it's settings as should. I see no need to replace it. Or is there?

Your BIOS reports 45C at idle? I'm not saying this is the problem, but I think 45C idle is too hot. This means when you put load on your machine, temp is going higher. My machine idles around 32C, with stock fan, sink and "toothpaste".

No...45˚C at full load.
I've written a small c++ program with a endless loop and put in some serious calculations so that CPU load gets 100% and left it running for about 15min and temp was 43˚C if I remember correctly.

Well I've also ran memtest86+ for the whole night and it returned no errors. Also checked for bad sectors on the hard drive and it reported no bad sectors using MHDD. It had tons of <3ms times of access, a bit less of <10ms even more less on <50ms and 7 <150ms times of access but otherwise it was all correct.

But when running Windows the computer freezes faster than on Linux. Sometimes it freezes when I start an .mp3 file from a NTFS partition, but not always. Could this be connected? Some corrupted data on a NTFS partition?

I've had this error before. It's usually the IDE cable. Unplug the IDE cable and thoroughly inspect. If you see any kind of dent or splice or anything that shouldn't be there, replace it.

Other then that, it could be a cracked motherboard. They can get hair thin cracks in them.

Well cable looks clean on surface but I've removed it and connected the DVD-RW unit with the Primary IDE cable and selected it as Primary Slave and works ok...until now. We'll see in a day or two if it will last.