Andi Kleen wrote:

That sounds more like a hardware problem. AFAIK people have used SLES8-SP3 on K8D successfully. I would first check out if your system runs memtest86 for at least 24h to rule out any memory issues.

I have tried this on a couple of my servers, and at least one of them has been running RH8 or RH9 for a few weeks, and I may have even run some system stress tests on them before. I use mprime, as I've found it to be more effective at detecting flaky hardware than memtest; it finds bad ALUs and DPs as well as memory. I am convinced my problem is trying to configure a HBA of any sort into the system with the basic installation. Looking at my notes, I had the basic OS installed from the CD onto a basic system with no added HBAs, and had no problems. The boot problems started when I tried to install the HBAs onto a system that had the OS installed, but were fixed after all the patches were applied. The Oracle install problems started after the SP3 patches were applied (on th x86/32 bit version). A this moment, I am applying SP3 to a newly installed SLES 8/x86_64. I'll report later on how that goes. eyc