[plug] [OT-ish?] Need help diagnosing unstable computer

[Cameron Patrick]

On Thu, Aug 07, 2003 at 10:49:01PM +0800, Daniel wrote:

| I just wonder if you used a knoppix cd or similar to run the memtest? 
| if not - would that be a worthwhile way of narrowing things down?

Bingo!  It was, but not in the way I expected it to be ... my machine
hanged whilst burning a Knoppix CD.  Upon further investigation it seems
to hang repeatably while burning any CD at all.  (I tested with two
different CD burners, two CD-Rs and a CD-RW, first using k3b and later
cdrecord from the command line without X running, and in all cases it
died horribly after burning less than half a CD.  No kernel messages
were printed to the console.)

Could it be that the nforce2 IDE driver is b0rken?  Or that 2.4.21's IDE
is broken altogether?  (Kernel <= 2.4.20 doesn't seem to support nforce2
IDE at all so I can't go back to my old kernel - it panicked on boot
doing a partition check on hda.)

Kernel gurus (i.e. Tony): Is it worth downloading 2.6.0-test2 and giving
it a shot?  I read somewhere that cdrecord and cdparanoia don't work
at all under 2.5/2.6, is this correct?  Any caveats that I should be
aware of besides apt-get install module-init-tools?

Cameron.