sk8r-365 wrote:
> 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.


That is the one item I plan on isolating first. It's not the CD drive
though. Read on....

The CD-ROM in the PC was flaky when I received it in 2005. I had to
remove it, open it, and I found the tray was stuck and the laser LED
carrier wouldn't move. I applied a small amount of white grease, did a
lot of testing, and then reassembled the drive.

Then it worked good, so I could install Debian Sarge.

After two years, when I tried to open the CD-ROM to insert the Etch CD,
the drive wouldn't open. This is probably a mechanical problem because I
can feel some vibration.

Using a thin hook (cable lashing sewing needle), I was able to get the
door to open and the tray followed. After working it a few times it
"self-lubricated" and worked without sticking.

Then I tried to install Etch, but there were occasional read errors from
the CD. I remove this CD-ROM drive and installed a spare CD-R/W just to
run the Etch CD. It ran perfectly, and Etch was installed (or actually
Sarge was upgraded).

Now I'm kinda leaning more toward the IDE channel since LiveCDs also are
crashing, as well as the Etch on the hard drive. The only time it has
ran for several days is when using tomsrtbt from a floppy. It also ran
for several days when I accessed the BIOS screen and left it in that
condition so I would know if it had rebooted or not.

Si I'm going to disconnect the CD-ROM drive, both power and IDE, and see
if it runs without trouble. If so, in a week or so, I'll plug the power
back into the CD-ROM and test further. The next step would be to plug
the IDE cable back into the drive and run it for another week.

Should that fail, I'll disconnect the hard drive instead, and boot a
LiveCD of Knoppix and test that way.

Right now it is running the memtest86 from an Ubuntu 7.04 Feisty Fawn
LiveCD, and the hard drive is still connected. A week has passed with no
failures.

Time will tell, and it certainly takes time.


--
John

No Microsoft, Apple, Intel, Trend Micro, nor Ford products were used in the preparation or transmission of this message.

The EULA sounds like it was written by a team of lawyers who want to tell me what I can't do. The GPL sounds like it was written by a human being, who wants me to know what I can do.