rmarkin

Hardware: Soyo KT600 Dragon Plus V2.0 Athlon XP 3200 (Barton) 512 MB PC2700 On-board audio On-board NIC 80 gig Hitachi SATA (also tried 30 gig Maxtor IDE) ATI Radeon 7200 (also tried Nvidia GF4 MX 440) PS2 Keyboard Microsoft USB Wheel Mouse (also tried generic PS2 mouse) OS's tried: Ubuntu 5.04 (Hoary) Ubuntu 5.10 (Breezy) Mandriva 2005 LE Problem: Sporadic hard freeze requiring a reset. No response from Alt-Ctrl-F* or Alt-Ctrl-Backspace. Freeze would occur during random tasks or while doing nothing at all. Freeze would occur while running random apps or none at all. All available updates installed (when possible). No other software added beyond the base "Desktop" system with Gnome and KDE. Sometimes the system would run for 15 - 20 minutes between freezes, sometimes it would freeze almost immediately. A couple of times it froze while sitting at the login screen. The freezes always were the same in that the system would stop responding although I could still move the mouse. The only difference that I did notice was when I changed to the Nvidia card, the screen would slightly distort when the system froze. With the ATI card the display would stay clear when it froze. Either way it froze. Each time I made a hardware change I did a clean install of whichever OS I was trying. There seemed to be no difference between the freezing in either Gnome or KDE. All installs went smooth with no apparent issues. All installation media are burned ISO's from reputable mirrors. The system has been very stable up until installing these OS's. CPU temp in BIOS on average is 42c. Stable OS's include WinXP and Mandrake 8.1 which both work fine with no freezing. I am very patient and have nothing but time, and am very curious as to what is causing these crashes. Any help would be appreciated.

Which line in the Grub config file do I add the "noapic" or the "acpi=off" parameters? Robert

Thank you for the replies, I have went backwards briefly in an attempt to move forward. In order to make troubleshooting easier, I have performed another clean install as follows: hda is 80gig hitachi SATA with XP Pro (so that I can reply to posts reliably) hdb is 80gig SATA hitachi with Ubuntu 5.10 (Breezy) exhibiting the same symptoms described above. I will leave the system as is while troubleshooting. Bootloader is GRUB. The rest of the hardware is the same as first post, and I am using the Nvidia GF4 MX 440 video card. Ubuntu has no additional software added from the base install. The updates have NOT been done because it will not run the 1.5 hours it takes to d/l them. I have not yet tried disabling USB in BIOS but it doesn't seem likely to fix it because when the system crashes, about the only thing that continues working is the USB mouse! I will try it though just in case. About the "noapic" parameter, I have done some reading and that looks promising. Which line do I add it to? Am I correct in thinking that if at the GRUB menu I press "e" and edit a line, it is only effective for that particular boot-up? I also read about "acpi=off" fixing some issues, but again I don't which line to add it to. danleff, The freezes occur at random times, and so far have not occurred while accessing a CD. In fact amazingly it did it at a console yesterday. I had logged-in in terminal mode and while just sitting there the normally white text turned different colors and the font became very distorted. I could still interact with the console, but I could not read anything. Thank you for your ideas, Robert

Thank you for your reply, I am using a PS2 keyboard and I have tried with a PS2 mouse as well. (No USB devices connected). I have not tried disabling USB in the BIOS but I will. I'll get back with you, Robert