I made a completely new installation of Fedora 6 on a AMD box that used to run Fedora 3 without a problem.

After about 15 minutes of use the screen, keyboard and mouse freeze. Ctrl+Alt+F2, Ctrl+Alt+delete etc. have no effect. If I ping from anotherPC then it says Destination Host Unreachable.

Have removed Floppy, CD drive and second HDD and still same problem.
Reconnect CD and floppy. Reinstall FC 6 with default options. Problem persists.

Found that if I try to get a large file by sftp then it freezes almost immediately.

So I edited the boot command in GRUB to boot into runlevel 3.

Then sftp get runs for about 15 Mb and then it freezes again.

After boot I look at /var/log/messages and find a few unusual (well, I do actually not know much about the meaning of these messages) things but I am not sure that there is any relation to the freezing:
...
process 'sysctl' is using deprectaed sysctl net.ipv6.neigh.lo.base_reachable_time
use net.ipv6.neigh.lo.base_reachable_time_ms instead
...
WARNING: No NSS sopport for mDNS detected, consider installing nss-mdns
...
No servie found in /etc/avahi/services
...
smartd has forked into background
***this was the last message before freeze. Power down***
restart


I would be very happy to for your help.
Thanks
Ernst

on another post I saw that the on-board LAN might be a problem.
- So I disabled the NIC in the BIOS.
- Also switched from Gnome to KDE
- After logging in:
KDE crash handler
kdesktop crashed, signal 6 (SIGABRT)
can't look at backtrace because system frozen

another thing just at the beginning of the boot sequence there is a message:
PCI failed to allocate mem resource #6

As the boot continues happily after that I am not sure if this can be ignored?

Regards
Ernst

Maybe the following boot message indicates where the freeze problem originates:

PCI failed to allocate mem resource #6: 10000@fe000000 for 0000:01:00.0

lspci | grep 01:00
shows it is the video card

VGA compatible controller: Nvidia Corporation NV5M64
[RIVA TNT2 Model 64/ Model 64 Pro] (rev 15)

Strange thing is that with an earlier FC3 or FC4 installation there was never a freeze problem. All drivers were always straight off the FC distribution CDs.

That I have replaced the CRT with an LCD screen surely would not be the problem?

Any ideas welcome.

Thanks
Ernst

I lost lots of time with this but now I have big hopes.

Got a license for TuffTEST to check the hardware.
Found problem on ATA HDD and fixed it with MaxBlast.

Will have to reinstall and hope all will be ok.

ernst,

Thank you for coming back with the solution, that was very good of you - especially considering you didn't get a reply.

I am having the exact same problem with Ubuntu and Mandriva. I think it might be a kernel issue, but I really don't know. When I disable my LAN from the BIOS, the problem seems solved. But also, I think that it is not this simple as I believe another hardware combination also gave me some peace.

At the moment, I am running without the onboard LAN and I'm hoping that installing a PCI one won't give me the same bother.

Did your diagnostic tools give you anything interesting?

Regards,
Unholy

Well, in the end I thought that my time spent on this was worth more than paying for upgrading mobo, cpu and memory.
So I did and got it all to work. (Although only after considerable trouble with faulty new hardware)
Ernst

I'm going to get TuffTEST. Does it come down in ISO when you buy it? I don't have a windows machine so I need to be able to burn it off from linux.