I have just 'upgraded' (not fresh installed) on of my 'live' Slackware 11 boxes to Slackware 12 after having ran current on a test partition for some time. I do not blame Slackware 12 for this problem as previously mentioned I have been running a test bed of current for a while now.
Today I 'bit the bullet' and set out to upgrade - (not a fresh install) - one of my PC's to Slackware 12 from Slackware 11. I now find I'm getting an intermittent boot error. Just after selecting 'Slackware 12 new' from lilo the standard boot process starts giving me "loading.... , BIOS check...., Uncompressing linux..." as per usual.
At this point I am randomly getting "crc error" and the boot process hangs. I'm terrified that this maybe a hardware error (the 300GB HD is only 4 months old) but booting to other partitions seem OK. Be aware - this is a random problem and doesn't happen every time. I've tried messing around with 'smartctl' and 'fsck' etc but no problems seem to surface. I really do not see this being a Slackware problem but maybe a hardware one (hope not !!) or possibly lilo as I don't think even the kernel is loaded at this stage. Anyway - if anyone can give me any pointers to any linux disk testing utils (please not spinrite or any Windows stuff) i would appreciate it. Cheers...

You can download drive diagnostic tools and check the drive to rule it out before it becomes a problem.

Might also do a fsck on the drive to make sure structure is intact.

I got a similar error, but it wasn't intermittent and reinstalled lilo and that fixed it.

Would first run diagnostic tools on the drive before panicking too much though.

A good cd with about a zillion different testing tools and other useful stuff is Ultimate boot CD. Sounds like RAM to me... if it was the hard drive it would probably happen every time. UBCD has MemTest so it's good for that.

Thanks for the replies - Im going to dload UBCD as a priority and run whatever tests it offers.

...Interesting. Do you think the area of memory used for a disk buffer and subsequent CRC algorithm may be causing a `hiccup` ? Don't take this the wrong way but I'm glad someone else has had these glitches and it has proved not to be so bad (i.e. fatal)!!

Yeah, that's what I was implying. So first check in my book would be running MemTest off UBCD so it gets at least 1 "pass" without errors, that would eliminate RAM as the problem. Then there are numerous other test programs available, e.g. hard drive test tools from various manufacturers, and so on.

Well, I haven't had that glitch specifically, but a friend of mine had a similar kind of problem with hash fails on a torrent and that turned out to be RAM. Like I said, if it was the hard drive you could reasonably expect it to happen pretty much all of the time. Once a hard drive sector is caput, generally that's it for that sector, but RAM can get allocated differently on different boots.

However, it is very odd that the error only appeared once you upgraded. I assume you verified the newer Slackware downloads. Maybe try booting off a Slackware disc (the prompt at the start typically has something like "in a pinch, you can boot an install by...") and see if that works fine. I don't really know what that would eliminate though...