Hello,

I am experimenting system freeze at random times since I updated to Mandrake 10.0. This appears:
1) every time I run a disk check after rebooting from a crash (after checking a random amount of the disk, 5% to 95%)
2) at run time, randomly, most time within the first few minutes of use

The point 1) seems to suggest there's a hardware problem, but it is very hard to locate since the system really freeze (num lock and cap lock don't respond, mouse is frozen, everything seems to stop, when the hard drive is active, it keeps being active and the other way round). I even tried to reinstall the distrib from scratch but it didn't change anything. Did anyone got the same problem, or has a idea about how to locate the problem more precisely?

I'll try to describe some of my configuration here:
CPU: Athlon XP 2600+
Motherboard: MSI K7N2G-ILSR
Graphic card: Assus radeon 9600XT
Hard Drive 1: Seagate Barracuda ST380011A (80GB)
Hard Drive 2: matrox 6Y080P0 (80GB)

Linux is on the three last partitions of the first hard drive.

I had the Mandrake 9.1 version installed and there was no problem, so it is really strange... I'm not sure what to do now, has anyone got any idea?

Thank you

Nicolas.

Your K7N2G board has an nForce2 chipset. I had exaclty the same problem with my Biostar M7NCD with nForce2 chipset, also with Ath-XP 2600+.

I searched for ages for a solution, even tried a few other distros (gentoo, suse, PClinuxOS, Knoppix, Kanotix, even debian sarge and sid!), all would eventually start locking up, then only a hard reset was possible, which of course invoked a disk fschk and then HANG again!

What you need to do is include the following in your kernel boot options (append line in lilo) ..

noapic nolapic

note this isnt ACPI! it is the APIC which is interferring with the ACPI, or so I could figure out after loads of searching. I may have got the reason wrong but including the above options WORKS, I have not experienced a hang in over 2 weeks, including a spate of over 72 hrs without rebooting (yes I know its only a small amount of time but its just a figure, not a boast! lol)
And the second option above uses a lower case 'L' (not a number 1 or a pipe).

I use the above on any live CD i try, just pass those params to the kernel with any others, if its Grub then you can edit the line on the fly at boot time.
Also, if you use them with the boot options for install of MDK10.0 (mine used to freeze during install!!) then lilo will be configured with the noapic option, I always add the nolapic option to be sure.

Like I said above I'm not entirely sure of the reason, but my ACPI still works and power-down still works, and no hanging! I have no clue what APIC does, all I know it would screw my system! lol

Hope this works, and I have seen this for a few nforce2 boards.

Aus.

also see a few other posts about this issue:

one of which : http://www.linuxquestions.org/questi...hreadid=171131

(I bet by the time you've read this you may have already found the answer???

Thank you so much for your post!

I actually search quite long time for a similar problem on the linuxquestions forum without finding much... I just had the wrong keywords since I completed the installation! Not that I already tried the "noapic" option before and it didn't work, so the nolapic seems compulsary

I was getting ready to install an other distrib! Now it's working great. Your post saved me so much time! Thanks again.