[Sderby] suse 8.2 crashing

[Harry Sheppard]

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Hello all,

New poster to this list (have been lurking for a week or so) but I feel I have 
to add my two-pennyworth here as I've had similar experiences with SuSE 8.x. 
Potential problems are listed in order of likelihood IMHO:

- - Memory: Definitely try David Bottrill's suggestion of running MemTest86 - 
it's very thorough and can usually identify which memory bank contains the 
dodgy DIMM. As it's Kingston RAM, though, I'd be astonished if it was faulty 
unless it'd been zapped on installation.

- - General CPU / Northbridge failure: make sure your Athlon and chipset is 
being cooled properly. There are probably temperature readings in the BIOS 
setup utility - go and have a look to make sure it's not steadily baking 
itself. Does the machine keel over from cold or after having been run for a 
few minutes? If it dies immediately, it's a good bet it's not the CPU 
overheating. If you can, install and run CPUburn to give your processor a 
good kicking. If it's gonna fail due to CPU, this'll make it do so. Be sure 
to read the warnings on Bob Reidelmeier's site first, though ( 
http://users.ev1.net/~redelm/ )

- - BIOS: Do a hardware reset of your BIOS, then enter CMOS setup on boot and 
load the defaults, then save and exit. If that doesn't help, check your BIOS 
revision: Ensure you're running the latest BIOS patch for your board. If you 
look at the revision history for your BIOS on ASRock's web site and you find 
you're running the first revision of your BIOS that supports that chip, 
you're probably suffering from "version 1.0 syndrome". Update the BIOS, but 
if at all possible have your machine running from a UPS to ensure it doesn't 
get trashed during the flash stage of the upgrade if the power goes out on 
you.

- - AGP timing: This one is extremely obscure and had me tearing my hair out for 
ages with one machine. The Xabre 200 is an 8x-capable card. Your motherboard 
supports AGP 8x, but remember that the AGP bus is running at a thunderous 
533MHz at that setting. If you have a slightly flakey PSU that gives a rumbly 
+5v or +12v line it can scupper reliable AGP 8x communications. If you've got 
a rather gutless 250 / 300w PSU, see if you can swap it out temporarily for a 
400w one or so. Athlons are rather power-hungry and loading a PSU to the 
upper end of its capacity tends to make them noisier...

Try throttling the AGP port to 4x or even 2x (usually through the BIOS) and 
see if that improves matters. Also, try killing the X server (from your 
graphical login screen after boot, do a CTRL + ALT +F1, then log in as root 
and issue

# rcxdm stop

(from memory - check with your SuSE handbook)

to kill the X server. Try running YaST again from the console in text mode and 
see if the machine behaves.

I can't remember offhand if XFree has native support for the SIS6326 chipset 
on your Xabre 200 - if not, it may well be in framebuffer mode which caused 
all sorts of problems with my little Vaio PGC-FX201 laptop (also an SIS 
chipset but with a Rage Mobility graphics chip) until the appropriate kernel 
parameters were found to make it behave.

Finally, have you had any other operating systems running on this machine? If 
you had Win 2000 or XP on there, did it misbehave at all or was it all plain 
sailing? 

Sorry this has spiralled out into a novella, but hopefully it should give you 
some food for thought.

TTFN,
Harry Sheppard
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