I am in the process of upgrading our Debian Sarge to Etch. I have successfully compiled and booted a 2.6 kernel. The new kernel boots with no trouble, all services are working as expected, but about 2 minutes after boot it freezes and we have to hard reboot.

I've checked the kernel .config numerous times for the culprit. ACPI is not flagged, so that's not the problem (in fact none of the power management modules are flagged). I've booted into different kernel configurations at least 10 times, always with this same result. At this point, the kernel flags are trimmed down to only the essential essentials.

There is nothing strange going in the logs or dmesg leading to a possible culprit. I'm totally stumped at this point.

I'm hoping that someone else has had this rather annoying problem and can point me in the right direction.

We are running Debian Sarge, 2.6 kernel
hardware:
2 x AMD MP 2000+
Tyan Tiger MPX
raid array-
3ware Escalade ATA RAID controller
Adaptec SCSI HBA controller (using the new driver)

Well, building a custom kernel to do the tricky Sarge->Etch upgrade is a new one for me... I suggest to:
1) install (if not available now) and boot into the default 2.6.8 kernel from Sarge, then
2) change Sarge to Etch in your sources.list
3) do the update and dist-upgrade sequence
4) check for essential packages to be present _prior_ to rebooting, like xorg, kdm/KDE and/or gdm/Gnome. Note that ssh is not installed by default in Etch.
5) reboot into the default 2.6.18 Etch kernel

Good luck!

I'm sorry to say that either you didn't read the release notes for the upgrade or, if you did, then you didn't follow them. I suggest you read them now, there may be a solution to your problem there:
http://www.debian.org/releases/stabl...release-notes/

Thanks for the replies. I had read the release notes, and I know it's not the Debian way, but we were afraid to use the debian linux-image right off-the-bat as our system is highly customized. However, I believe jumping directly into the upgrade and using the linux-image has worked! The system is upgraded and our 2.6 kernel has been up for 10 minutes without freezing. : )

Well done! Now you can build a customized kernel. Make sure you have the build-essential package installed for that!

Excellent news! Now if you want to, you can recompile in the usual way using the .config from your custom kernel and it should all work.