Well it seems you got a bit further.

Since you used all settings you've basically disabled all of the motherboard specific stuff that could have been hanging your machine.

This points to either a problem with the ATI drivers or a more serious problem with your system motherboards.

With all of those settings Linux should be running albeit slowly.

The noagp turns off AGP access which can be problematic on some motherboards that set their agp transfer rates too high... etc. This is not the way one would want to leave things but it suffices for testing and problem isolation.

Anyway "X" seems to exacerbate the situation in your case.

When the machine hangs now, can you ALT-BACKSPACE or CTRL-ALT-F1 to get back to the console?

Does your machine hang if you leave it running in text mode only?

Have you tried a "FAILSAFE" boot, and does this work?

hi,

1) when the machine hangs; it HANGS ; I can't return to any console and can't login using ssh.

2) it must be X because it never hangs while working in a console (even if Xorg is still running)

3) when booting in failsafe, I end up in a console (single user mode). Since the text mode "never" crashes; I issued "init 5"
to go graphical; notice that an mesa video driver is loaded instead of the ATI driver. Well, it hanged...............

maybe a hardware fault after all (but window$ runs fine)
michiel

well; another remark
when booting "linux noapic nolapic nousb noagp nopcmcia noapm noacpi" I still get usb, pcmcia,agp modules in the lsmod listing.
Is this normal??

michiel

I'm seeing serveral people complaining about the same problem under Xorg.

It may be that the ATI drivers are having problems under Xorg, whereas they may not have problems under XFree.

Can you go back to the stock drivers from Mandrake instead?

Just re-install the RPM's.

Re: Modules

Yes that is normal. They actually get reloaded as the drivers need them.

i' wondering of this isn't a hardware conflict of some sort ?

michiel

Here I found a comment that might bring light to this situation. Its not much, but it supports my theory that ATI is dragging their heels on making drivers for Linux. They don't want to keep up to date, for some reason. I guess that if you wait for a bit, they may have a driver written for the new X-servers (I'll cross my fingers, as I want to get a new vid card soon)

This thread on Kerneltrap seems to show hope, though. Write to ATI. I will as well. I'd like to buy from them again, but...

FWIW, I have two seperate Mandrake 10.1 CE machines that I installed ATI cards in...both XOrg 6.7, both kernel 2.6.8.1. One of these machines has random crashes and similar kernel messages to yours, most notably the mtrr one. It's an ATI 9200SE 64MB card, EPox RDA83 motherboard and 512 MB RAM, and I get random kernel panics...the machine halts in less than 36 hours consistently. It's a server most of the time so it happens regardless of X usage. I tried a bunch of things to no avail, but I had some sneaking suspicion about NFS usage being a trigger so I halted the NFS and SMB services....and the machine has been up for more than 72 hours...a new record. Sounds random, but worth trying anyway...

The other box is a desktop and runs X most of the time using an ATI 9600 (dual monitors) and a different motherboard...doesn't have the crashing problem. But the ATI driver 3.14.1 appears to leak memory like crazy in Neverwinter Nights. :/

mmh.\,

no its not the nfs or smb services, i'm now very sure its the video driver.
I just set "no_accel" to "yes" in the XFree86-4 config file and i don't get hangs anymore;
scrolling,moving is very very very slow though.

michiel

mdk 10.1 run Xorg 6.8? I've heard (from the #gentoo irc channel) that the ATI drivers break Xorg 6.8.x

Of course i have not had any problems installing MDK 10.1 with my 9800XT 256MB.

it could be a hardware problem, such as bad memory, or a block of bad memoy on the video memory.

did you try memtest to test the systems memory?

i think the option is memtest86 at boot, unless MDK didn't add this??

While searching for answers to your problem, I did come across a few hints that Xfree 4.2 would probably work with the ATI drivers, if you want to roll back what you're using until they write new drivers to be compatible with Xorg. Just a though.

memtest is a good idea as well. I didn't see it on the mandy disks when installing (but that was a few months ago now - when 10.1 was beta), but its a small download and can be run from floppy (which is how I got it originally). Cheers

well, i tried memtest86 (booted from hard disk) but after the boot it displays some system information, dies suddenly after 3 sec and does a warm start

i'll try Xfree 4.2 sometime later... (first i'll try 4.3 or is that the same as xorg 6.7?)
michiel

I don't think so. I believe 6.7 was 4.4 up to, but not including, the revision that had the licence changes in it.

Try memtest from a bootable floppy or cd and see if its different. You can't run it from within an OS, if I remember correctly.

Did you install memtest into Lilo/Grub so it's offered as a boot option?

If you ran it this way and it fails, this is a very bad sign.

If you tried running it from a running Linux system, the reboot is probably normal, as it probably overwrote the kernel!

i added it to my lilo.conf so i would show up in the bootloader, haven't tried it from floppy though(no time, and were i left those damn floppies)

michiel

BTW, (should have mentioned it before) Memtest86 is included on many live-cds, so if you have cds, you could perhaps get where you want to be with a small one like DSL or Puppy. Maybe a diagnostic cd like Astrumi might be a good idea as well (that one can even access WinNT/2000/XP registry hives and help you restore or even reset your password if corrupted as well).

I am going to edit this post in a few minutes after I read the whole thread again, as I have an idea...