kernel double fault, previously laptop froze on any distro
 

Greetings,

My laptop's been locking up in Linux (Ubuntu, Backtrack, Puppy) periodically for a while now. When it locked up, it was always immune to the magic of SysRq, which I thought might indicate a hardware problem. It became so bad that I had to stop using the laptop.

Today, when I turned it on and tried to boot into Fedora 12, I got the following error (just once, it just locked up at various points during the splash screen after this once):


double fault: 0000 [#1] SMP
last sysfs file:
CPU 0
odules linked in:
Pid: 1, co m: swapper Not ta nted 2.6.32.11-99.fc 2.x86_64 #VGN-T 250N
RIP: 0010:[<ff


All the seemingly missing letters were really missing, not my typos.

As you can see, kernel version is 2.6.32.11-99.fc12.x86_64 and my laptop is a Sony Vaio TZ 250N (Core 2 Duo ULV 1.2GHZ). Note that with the other remaining kernels from the updates, nothing ever happened other than the locking up. The core temperatures hover pretty high, about 55-60C peak but this is still below the critical temp. Memtest came up clean when the problem first started happening.

I am mystified, does anyone have any insight?

Thanks in advance!

If it's locking up on them all, something _is_ funny with the hardware. Are the fins on the cpu heatsink free of dust? Did you run lm_sensors? I would boot from an install disk, and run esfsck with heavy options like -fcvy on your drive. Do compiles crap out? When I had a memory error, compiles would stop with some random gcc type error, and hitting up arrow and return it would carry on. Anything in logs?

I forgot to mention the Windows behavior. Windows just restarts the computer. It doesn't seem to have anything to do with temperature. I'm actually posting this from Windows right now, it's been up for a good 5 hours now. The temperature is relatively high, maintains around 55 for the two cores. As far as the hard drive goes, I get the same wonky behavior running from a LiveCD (my primary OS is a modified Puppy Linux USB stick). The last Memtest that finished (after it started acting up) came up clean, I'm going to try and run it again shortly and post the results.

As for logs, I can't get any linux running to the point of being able to get to the logs. I can't seem to figure out how to mount the Fedora ext4 LVM partition in Windows either.

Also, today Linux would lock up during the boot splash, but Windows has started fine every time I've tried. This has not been the case recently.

Is it possible for it to just be a bad part of the processor that isn't necessarily always used, like some obscure instructions circuit or something?

Thanks!

That sends us on a completely different track - you realise that?
Please give us full details of the fault symptoms, and let's take the presumptions out of this. Your lack of detail is the biggest problem I've noticed so far.