Hi there, i also have the same problem though it only started when i had to change my motherboard, before that mandrake 9.1 worked brilliantly and was extremely stable, now on my new mb it freezes like every few hours and almost always when theres harddrive activity, like when i open or close programs or even switch between programs in X. because of this my hardrive is also starting to take some strain i mean crashes cannot be good for the drive. i've checked the /var/log/messages but i don't know what to look for i can see the messages where it restarts but can't see whats going wrong before that. i'll try to post this next chance i get.

what bugs me is that windows runs fine and i seriously wanted to convince my father that linux is more stable than windows but this seems to prove me wrong. damn.

Any ideas. oh and i tried disabling the hd dma with hdparm but it just froze straight after that so i din't try again

I'm no expert, but if one is tuning in, the first question they will ask is: What motherboard?

As you can see from my earlier post in this thread, imprecise BIOS setups can affect different OSs in different ways. In my case an incorrect mouse setting caused Linux to lock up but did not affect Windows. A different error may work the other way round...

I suppose it could be the same with hardware faults, too. All worth looking into.

DAVE

i'll have to check the motherboard make coz i'm not sure. i think it might have to do with my apic settings (saw this in another thread) because i remember reinstalling and changing some apic setting after i change the motherboard but i'll check and let you know.