DANGER WILL ROBINSON! SERIOUS problem with current 5.4-PRERELEASE

[Drew Tomlinson]

On 3/30/2005 9:30 PM Karl Denninger wrote:

>On Wed, Mar 30, 2005 at 10:44:38AM -0800, Drew Tomlinson wrote:
>  
>
>>I missed the beginning of this thread and apologize if my question has 
>>already been covered.  But can you tell me if this issue might be the 
>>reason my PC locks up intermittently ?  I have whatever cheap card came 
>>with a Maxtor 160 GB SATA drive installed in this machine and the PC ran 
>>fine with Windows.  Now I'm trying install FBSD from the 5.4-BETA ISO I 
>>downloaded from the ftp site.  The PC runs POST fine and always boots 
>>from the CD to the boot menu.  After picking the default option 1 
>>(normal boot) the PC locks up anywhere from the dmesg output to 
>>sysinstall actually beginning to install the base package after doing 
>>the fdisk and disklabel stuff.  Should I download 5.3-RELEASE and try 
>>installing from that?
>>
>>Thanks,
>>
>>Drew
>>    
>>
>
>5.3-RELEASE may lock up too, but in different ways.  In a non-redundant disk
>situation a bogus fatal write error hoses you in extremely bad ways, including 
>possible file or filesystem metadata damage. I would NOT run 5.3 in an attempt 
>to get around this, in that such damage could remain "hidden" (although not
>without notice, as the errors will show up on the console!) for quite some
>time until you discover "holes" in your files or a critical metadata write
>craps out and causes a crash - possibly with a corrupted disk that fsck
>can't fix. Grave danger (to your data) lies down that road....
>  
>
[lot's of good info snipped]

Thanks so much for your response!  I've found my particular problem is 
most likely the actual CPU.  I've changed out every other part but the 
lock ups still occur.  They even occur during POST after the machine 
gets warm.  I'd change out the processor if I had one.  Anyone have an 
old AMD Athlon Slot A processor they'd be willing to part with?  :)

Thanks,

Drew

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