[plug] strangely crashing PPro [long]

[Craig Ringer]

Thanks for the suggestions folks. I've now nailed it - it was, indeed, a 
hardware issue.

I was able to keep the system running for 8+ hours by booting 
'init=/bin/bash', manually mounting /proc, brining up the network 
interfaces, and entering some basic iptables rules. There was no further 
disk I/O, no swap, and the root FS was mounted read-only. This strongly 
suggested a disk problem.

I'd tried two disks, so it seemed unlikely to be that.

Then, of course, my brain kicked in; I popped in a nice new ATA cable 
and fired it up.

It's still running, 24+ hours later. *sigh*. I did drop 4x32mb of RAM in 
at the same time, and I have disabled swap, so it /could/ be something 
else - but I'm inclined to suspect the cable was at fault.

So - sorry to have bothered you all. It's always the /one/ thing you 
don't think to test that gets you, isn't it...

Craig Ringer