Hello David, Thanks for the detailed explanation and elaborate post! On Thursday 06 November 2008, David C. Rankin wrote:
I've been through this twice in 8 years. Both times it was hardware. Once RAM and secondly a motherboard. To help diagnose, load mcelog. It is contained on your install DVD and will help identify any machine check exceptions (MCE) you are dealing with. If it catches any, you are 99.9% assured your issue is hardware. (there are very rare instances where code can trigger a mce - possible - but so is McCain becoming the 44th president)
Well, it seems you were right about McCain...however, mcelog seems to be for 64bit systems only. My system is an old and lowly 32 bit AMD, running at 1400 Mhz. :-) But I suspect hardware as well, because I have been using Suse since 7.3, and RedHat before that. The only time I've seen Linux lock up on me, was with faulty hardware.
The nvidia card/driver most likely isn't the problem, but you can easily eliminate the binary driver issue by editing your xorg.conf and commenting out the nvidia driver line and replacing it with the nv driver:
<snip instructions> I uninstalled the proprietary Nvidia driver during the weekend and ran the system on the 'nv' driver. However, this still results in lock-ups. :-( I've ran a memory test as well during the weekend, but that has resulted in no errors, so I guess the RAM is fine. I have since installed openSUSE 11 on this machine, and so far it seems to be running quite stable. I'll keep you posted! But...I'm going to start looking out for a new machine all the same. I think after 7 years of loyal service, this machine has earned its retirement. :-) Thanks, Joop