A hardware toughie
 

Hiya folks, I'm hoping some guru out there can help me end a pain in the ass hardware issue that's lasted several months.

It starts with me frying a processor due to crappy AMD heat sinks and hot Atholons mixed with a mis configured lmsensors while running slackware.

I replaced with a new Barton core 2600+. Then very shortly after started I started having seg faults and running memtests on boot found that it kept freezing up in a particular spot.

So I bought new memory. And then it did the same thing. And I discovered that it tested ok with no ram on any other memory channels. So it seemed logical to conclude that something went off with the motherboard (MSI k7n2-l) when the processor fried. I ran it with only one channel for a while but it started seg faulting that way as well.

So I got a new Asus a7n8x-x (the cheaper one with no dual channel RAM and no extra power for the processor).

I set it up and installed Debian 3.1 and got a segfualt and crash while running links2. Then more instability and crashes in X. So then I “thought oh crap it was the new processor all along”.

But, I realized I was getting a system message about a problem with IRQ7 which is supposed to be shared with the onboard parallel port and IDE0. I shut of the parallel port in bios and Debian, seeing a problem with IRQ 7, shifted ide to 5 on start.

Now the machine appears to be working fine.

So how do I figure out if there is a problem with this board or if it is the processor that is the trouble?

my w.a.g is neither, i think you found the problem with the irq sharing. some hardware doesn't like to share interrupts, even though that is a violation of the pci spec's. my old linksys nic and my sound card both wanted the same irq, caused me all sorts of random crashes.

hmm
 

That is the theory I was operating under when I shut off the paralell port.

But with it off Debian still saw a problem with IRQ 7 and shifted to 5.

Now nothing is running on 7 and the machine seems ok.

So what I am confused about is wonder if there is a problem with IRQ seven on the new board.

Or if there is some problem with the processor manifesting itself as not wanting to listen on IRQ 7 at this point that was the trouble with all the segfaults in the first place.