Feverishly pounding upon a keyboard John F. Morse typed:

<snip>
> It is an old AMD-K6 266 MHz box with 128 MB RAM. It was running Debian
> 3.1 until I upgraded it to Etch. I've done the same on several other
> identical computers with 266 and 233 MHz CPUs, and RAM down as low as 48 MB.
>
> I'd rule out the kernel Robert, because it fails with Debian Etch, and
> from a LiveCD, DSL and Knoppix. ;-)
>
> It did tun a full week with tomsrtbt. That, if anything, would lead me
> to suspect a hard drive issue. Perhaps the floppy-based tomsrtbt and the
> memtest86 do not look at the hard drive, so they do not fail. The
> LiveCDs, DSL and Knoppix, run from the CD-ROM drive, but might be
> occasionally looking at the hard drive.
<snip>

Very frankly I admit to having *no* idea what this "opps" matter is, but
I had a problem on my Etch box show up over the last two months with
varying messages, or none at all, in the logs. Kept having sudden halts
and plain old full system freeze-ups. Came down to an old CD-ROM burner
drive glitching out. After unplugging it there have been no more such
issues. So, it could be a drive causing problems... just a thought I
hope may be useful to you for testing.

--
sk8r-365
Ye blind guides, which strain at a gnat, and swallow a camel.
-- Matthew 23:24