How to troubleshoot solid freeze-up?

[David S. Madole]

I'm looking for some tips on how to troubleshoot a possible driver 
problem. Here is the scenario:

1. Using a Pentium II 333Mhz mobile processor, 82443BX motherboard, and 
Intel i82559 NIC (fxp driver).

2. A combination of heavy disk I/O, high CPU utilization, and high 
network traffic causes a solid machine freeze-up sometime between 10 
minutes and 3 hours of running.

3. Replacing the NIC with a DP83815-based card (sis driver) seems to 
solve the problem. I have run the problem load for up to 8 hours without 
issue on this NIC.

4. The problem is reproducable on multiple identical machines with 
multiple identical NICs. Also reproducable on an i82558 NIC integrated on 
the motherboard.

How can I go about collecting useful information to troubleshoot this 
when the machine locks solid? How can a get a core under this scenario?

Switching to another NIC permanently is not a great solution because this 
is a semi-embedded application and I need to use the NIC on the 
motherboard.

Thanks,
David Madole