verify your hard disk with the manufacturer's testing tools...

Hi Cristian, Thanks, but that was done first thing. It all checked out, so I reinstalled 9.2 and ran it for a few days and rechecked to rule out temperature effects. I have some new clues: from dmesg: "JBD: barrier-based sync failed on hdc3 - disabling barriers" Note: The affected partition is EXT3. If I 'sync' manually when a process 'hangs' with the hard drive activity indicator stuck 'on', all seems to be OK. So how do I fix this error? Thanks - Carl --