Howdy,
I am sufering from system freezes - rarely with flashing keyboard lights and mostly just complete hang - almost always in X but at least once during boot.

Redhat 9 (apps patched but running stock 2.4.18 kernel)
AMD Athlon 900
Chanintech ct-7aja mobo
256 MB ram
Adaptec 29160 & 2x seagate 9.1GB disks
HP 7500 cd writer ( using ide-scsi driver )
adaptec 2940 & no-name scsi cdrom & HP dat autoloader
creative labs pci sound card
3com 905 pci network card
Microsoft intellimouse - usb

I am running redhat 9 now but I was running 7.3 and had the same problem.
I thought that I could upgrade out of trouble...nope!

I have run memtest86 for hours and not found a problem with ram.

I have swapped out my Geforce mx2 ( after setting mem=nopentium at boot 'cos I have an athlon - didn't fix it) for an old S3 virge pci vga card and get the same problem but now seemingly more often?

I can't decide if it is hardware or if there is still something in X that doesn't work properly?

I have a copy of fedora but don't really want to do the upgrade in case it locks up part way through and leaves me with an unusable system.

My gut feeling is that it is a mobo problem by the way the whole thing locks up & doesn't have time to panic or write to a log.

My last throw of the dice is to put Win98 (yuk!) on an ide disk and run that for a while to see if it is the mobo or not and take the linux install out of the question- any other suggestions??

## ----------------------- lspci output ------------------------------------------ ##
00:00.0 Host bridge: VIA Technologies, Inc. VT8363/8365 [KT133/KM133] (rev
02)
00:01.0 PCI bridge: VIA Technologies, Inc. VT8363/8365 [KT133/KM133 AGP]
00:07.0 ISA bridge: VIA Technologies, Inc. VT82C686 [Apollo Super South]
(rev 40)
00:07.1 IDE interface: VIA Technologies, Inc. VT82C586/B/686A/B PIPC Bus
Master IDE (rev 06)
00:07.2 USB Controller: VIA Technologies, Inc. USB (rev 16)
00:07.3 USB Controller: VIA Technologies, Inc. USB (rev 16)
00:07.4 Bridge: VIA Technologies, Inc. VT82C686 [Apollo Super ACPI] (rev 40)
00:0e.0 VGA compatible controller: S3 Inc. 86c325 [ViRGE] (rev 05)
00:0f.0 Multimedia audio controller: Ensoniq 5880 AudioPCI (rev 02)
00:10.0 SCSI storage controller: Adaptec AHA-2940U/UW/D / AIC-7881U (rev 01)
00:11.0 Ethernet controller: 3Com Corporation 3c590 10BaseT [Vortex]
00:12.0 SCSI storage controller: Adaptec AIC-7892A U160/m (rev 02)


Many thanks
Ian

BTW,
I should add that these freezes can occur when I'm surfing and I click on a link , when I am editing in vim, when I am in bed and left the pc on downloading.
I left a
while : ; do
date
sleep 600
done
running last night and it lasted 5 hours before it locked up - strange ??

Just some suggestions here:

maybe your harddisk is damaged. i've seen linux act very strange on a harddrive whit bad blocks.
Maybe your cooling isn't good, so the system is getting to hot? you didn't overclocked the machine?

Wondered about overheating but cpu never above 45 deg C and case not usually over 35 deg C,. I am told this is pretty normal for an athlon??

I have a copy of seagate disk tools somewhere - so I'll give it a whirl, never had any reason to suspect the disks ( big finds work OK in text only mode) but need to be checked out I suppose. Could always go back to IDE disk if I really had to.
Thanks for the input.

That's a ok temp. sounds like your hard drive is messed up pal

it wasn't anything with Linux because it was doing it in Windows as well. After testing with computer parts from my girlfriend's computer I figured out it was my motherboard that had blown up. I replaced it and had no problems since. Before you change your mobo do run memtest86 on your ram first as it could be that as well. Keyboard flashing is hardware problem for sure.

is your sound card and netcard sharing an interrupt? should work in theory, doesn't work in real life. if so adjust your bios settings. you may have to re-arrange the cards in their slots with some brain dead motherboards.

cat /proc/interrupts at root prompt

Thanks for all the help so far - here is the latest news.......
Downloaded seagate's "enterprise seatools" & Jave JRE 1.4.something and ran the extended tests on both disks - sin problema, nada, (nothing).

Ran my while : ; do loop again overnight - this time no freezes box was still up this morning.

Have memtest86'd until cows come home - no problems with the dimms that are in (2x128MB)

Will check interrupts & post them here if I can & swap nic and sound card and see if that makes a difference.

ianv, i had the same problem. After swapping out every single piece of hardware down to the motherboard, I was able to isolate the problem, it was my processor. It's an Intel P3 450mhz. It did that at random times, but I found that it _always_ did it when trying to play an mp3 or access photoshop, anything processor intensive. I advise trying a different processor on your motherboard and seeing if it corrects the problem.

Howdy,
#### ----------------- /proc/interrupts --------------- ###
CPU0
0: 18054 XT-PIC timer
1: 110 XT-PIC keyboard
2: 0 XT-PIC cascade
5: 15 XT-PIC eth0
7: 1191 XT-PIC es1371
8: 1 XT-PIC rtc
11: 9391 XT-PIC aic7xxx
12: 10317 XT-PIC aic7xxx, usb-uhci, usb-uhci
14: 1464 XT-PIC ide0
NMI: 0
ERR: 0
### ------------------ looks ok to me ?? ----------- ###
Apparently there is a program for creating 99 digit prime numbers or something that puts a big load on yer cpu - can't find it when I google - any ideas ?
Otherwise is there software for testing mobo's and does it cost less than a new one?
Ta for the input - I think we are making progress even if it is just narrowing the prob to mobo & cpu - I think I might know what santa is bringing me this year...

will move the usb off the same irq as the scsi controller in the bios and see if that makes a difference