Hi, Am Samstag, 28. Februar 2004 20:28 schrieb Dr. David M. Colburn:
Hartmut Meyer wrote:
This could be a pointer to a hardware flaw (most likely defective RAM). You're not doing any overclocking or the like? My advise would be to let metest86 ("memory test" boot option from the 1st SUSE CD) run over night and see if it reports any errors.
Hmmm. I did start the memory test but after an hour and no errors I figured it was testing minutae that was improbable as the source of the trouble ... run it overnight? Wow! OK.
Letting it run overnight is the minimum (unless you see errors befor). And even if no errors are reported after many hours, that would be no proof of absence of hardware problems (unfortunately). memtest86 does not find all RAM defects (but most). It doesn't even have to be RAM (RAM is only the prime suspect). It could be CPU, cache memory, chipset, IDE bus, etc. Having said all that: it doesn't have to be faulty hardware. You may want to "play"with the various ACPI kernel parameters such as "pci=acpi" or "acpi=oldboot". See http://portal.suse.com/sdb/en/2002/10/81_acpi.html
I can also check the motherboard settings, perhaps something could be amiss there.
Go for the default or safe settings there too (after making a note of the current settings). Greetings from Bremen hartmut