After booting the PC, it will lockup randomly from between 5 minutes to 24 hours, but this only occurs on some distros. If a particular distro is locks up, then it will lockup at least once a day, but most often after 30 minutes. When I say lockup, I mean its unresponsive, mouse pointer doesn't move, keyboard doesn't do anything (including caps lock not toggling the LED), nothing changes on screen (like the clock in the panel). Does anyone have any ideas why some distros lockup and some do not?

Distros that have been found to lockup:
OpenSuse 10.2 32-bit KDE3.5 (live CD and install) 2.6.18.2
Linux Mint 4.0 32-bit KDE3.5 (live CD and install) 2.6.22
Fedora Core 9 64-bit KDE4 (live CD) 2.6.25

Distros that have *NOT* locked up:
Gentoo 2008.0 64-bit Xfce (live CD) 2.6.25.9
Ubuntu/Kubuntu/Xubuntu 8.04 64-bit Gnome/KDE3.5/Xfce (live CD and install) 2.6.24
Dreamlinux 3.1 32-bit Gnome/Xfce (live CD and install) 2.6.23.12
VectorLinux 5.9B2 64-bit Xfce (install) 2.6.22.19

My system information:
Abit NF-M2 nView w/nForce4130
Amd x2 3800
2GB OCZ PC6400
XFX GeForce 7600GS 256MB
SB Audigy2zs
200GB Maxtor SATA
160GB WD IDE
LG 16x DVDRW SATA
LiteOn 16x DVDRW IDE
Trendnet gigabit NIC

64 bit processor?

I found a similar (if not identical) symptom was caused by hardware not being properly recognized. My 64 bit system I believe has 32 IRQs where the old 32 bit systems had 16 IRQs. The new systems have the hardware on IRQs that the distros can't address properly.


Take a look at your system logs in /var/log... like, let one of them lock up hard, then reboot into one of the distros that don't lock up (or better yet a LiveCD that doesn't lock up) and see if the last entry has anything to do with addressing hardware.

I think the way I got around it was installing the base system on a 32 bit machine then custom compiling a kernel for the 64 bit system on that same machine, setting it all up, then transferring the drive to the 64 bit machine. Bit of a hassle, but it worked.