[Gllug] Linux freezing

[Richard Jones]

On Fri, May 25, 2007 at 11:35:51AM +0100, Matthew Joseph Smith wrote:
> One thing I have noticed is that my dual processor setup was obviously 
> not installed properly, because every time I switch on, the computer 
> gives me a "1801 microcode patch error" and tells me to upgrade my BIOS. 
>   However, the system performs normally when I boot, except for these 
> occasional freezes.  I've searched the internet and found other reports 
> of Feisty freezing on people, although the nature of the crashes varies, 
> but nobody has mentioned this as a factor.
> 
> Would upgrading my BIOS cure this?  I've looked on the HP site and it 
> seems the updates require Windows to run, and although I have Windows XP 
> on my primary HDD, it will not boot since I transferred the drive from 
> another machine.  Does anyone have any ideas on how to make that work?

It does sound like a hardware problem of some sort.  You should
install the memtest86+ package, reboot and then run memtest from the
boot menu.

If it can run memtest for a few hours without any errors at all, then
it's (probably) not hardware and you can start to look for BIOS
upgrades, microcode updates and the like.  FWIW the last time I had to
upgrade the BIOS on a machine, I had to download a CD image (ISO) from
the manufacturer's website, burn it and then boot off that CD.  No
specific operating system was required (it looked like the CD had
FreeDOS on it).

Rich.

-- 
Richard Jones
Red Hat
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