Hello Community,

I have periodically dabled with several distros from Redhat 5.0 onward. For the most part installation and running the systems have been uneventful. However, I cannot seem to get Mandrake 10.0 or any Fedora release to run without random lockups. Usually these events occur within 5 minutes of logon in X-windows. They also occur prior to logon. The mouse continues to move, but that's it. Crt-Alt-Del does nothing and I have yet to try Crt-Alt-F1 (because I do not know how to get back out to my other session, see still a newbie). These lockups are all post install. Redhat 9.0 runs perfectly and (I think) Mandrake 9.0 does too.

I suspect the issues are in the newer kernels or something.

Windoze runs fine. Well now it doesn't cause I seem to have corrupted the MBR perhaps with grub...anyone know how to get NTLDR back again? I don't really need windoze but would like to save some data. I have a floppy with LILO for my RH 9.0 install (in case I really mess something up).


My hardware is as follows:

Abit KT-7 Raid (bios version A9) with Duron 600 and 384MB of Crucial ram.
Generic Geforce 2 MX
Turtle Beach Santa Cruz sound card
2 Western Digital disks
2 CD drives, one is an old Mitsui writer

BTW...the Highpoint controller is disabled. All my drives are connected via standard IDE.

I could use some advice in how to find and analyze log files...etc.

Thanks,
Possum

I found the system log and a kernel error seems to be occuring. It says.....

Kernel mtrr: 0xe0000000,0x2000000 overlaps existing 0xe0000000,0x100000

Since this problem occurs with Fedora and Mandrake 10/10.1, it would seem my hardware doesnt like 2.6.x kernels.

CRTL-ALT-F1 does not allow me to log on, and cap locks/num locks are frozen. The system is quite dead.

my researching the error indicates it might be some problem with RAM values, or my Nvidia Geforce2 MX (32mb).

But this is all greek to me. ANY HELP would be apreciated.

Possum

I'm having the same problem with several different releases of Fedora of different machines.
The only thing I found in common is that the lockup seems to happen while the mouse is in motion.
Any help with this would be greatly appreciated.

I get a complete lockup when copying files from my Fedora 2 server over the LAN, SMB or NFS, makes no difference it still locks up completely.

I'm wondering if this is related to large cache (my WD 160 has 8 meg) drives.

How big is the cache on your primary ( / ) drive?

regards.......Blake.

additional:

I'm backing up my FC2 machine and I will scrub it and install Mandrake9 (or any older version fo Linux) to see if this solves the problem.