[ale] Kernel and hardware woes

[J.M. Taylor]

James, John, Jonathan, Ryan, Greg, Jeff, et al:

James, thanks for the lesson in physics, I think a thorough understanding
of these things would help me flail around less when debugging hardware vs
software issues.  Are you sh***ng me about cosmic rays? ;)  I *do* have a
large, dragon shaped hole bored into the side of my machine, but that was
done long ago and I think a more mundane motherboard-is-crap explanation
is going to be my key.

So. I can't test my memory in another box because this is the only machine
in the house that accepts DDR.  The hard drives are fine, the IDE
controllers appear to be fine. I have booted with a rescue disk and still
get the kernel panics, fsck almost invariably produces the "Unable to
handle kernel NULL pointer dereference at virtual address 00000004" error,
followed by all the output that I posted earlier.  As I said before, it's
not just fsck, but that triggers it every time.

So if I understand correctly, I'm down to either: CPU is bad, chipset is
bad, motherboard in general is bad, or RAM is bad.

My CPU runs REALLY hot. Really, really hot.  Hotter than I expected.  Avg
temp is 172 degrees F.  This is an AMD athlon 1.4Ghz, cooled by a
ThermalTake somethingorother 4400rpm CPU fan.  Avg system temp is 99
degrees F.  I don't actually know what's normal for these type processors.

Thanks for all the input.  It is very much appreciated.

Jenn





_______________________________________________
Ale mailing list
Ale at ale.org
http://www.ale.org/mailman/listinfo/ale