I recently bought a new computer, a K6-233, really nice. Unfortunately,
somewhere in the kernel startup phase, it reboots. So far as I know, it
never makes it into user space. Unfortunately, the messages go by so
fast that I am not able to read them.
First, my configuration. The computer's motherboard is an "M5ATA Pentium
Super Tx System Board" with onboard IDE and etc. (A little research
gives me that it's an "ALi M1531/1543 Super TX Chipset", to be
specific.) The CPU is a new AMD K6-233, newer than the K6 bug. I have
only 32 megs of RAM on the system (another reason why it can't be the K6
bug) I took a look at a README file for a DOS driver that it came with
and also came up with it having an "ALi M5229 IDE Bus Master Controller"
The only other thing of note in the documentation is a note that reads
"Supports Ultra DMA/33 Hard drives", but that doesn't sound like
anything that would trigger my problem. I have also upgraded to the
latest version of my BIOS, but no dice.
So far, I have found possible refrences to what the problem might be in
comp.os.linux.* archives, the RedHat web site, and the Debian web site.
But, none of their suggestions helped. (These include turning off
internal and external cache, and tinkering with out BIOS setting and
LILO command lines. Unfortunately, I've spent so much time at it that I
don't remember everything I tried.) Thinking it might have been a
problem with a 2.0 kernel, as RedHat's web site suggested, I hacked one
of their disks to have a 2.1 kernel, but that didn't boot either. I have
also tried enabling the Ali 14* driver in the kernel, but that also
didn't help. To rule out a problem with the IDE controller, I tried
booting with ide0=noprobe and ide1=noprobe, but I think you can guess
the result, by now.
The only additional hardware I have installed is a Matrox Millennium
graphics card and a 3com ethernet adapter (that says on the box that it
is compatible with Linux)
I'm sorry to say that, under Windows, everything works fine. Knowing
that Windows is terrible at putting any stress on the system, I'll be
getting a copy of OS/2 to play with and see how that works out. I must
repeat that I have had no problems of any sort under Windows 95, even
under consistent heavy load. I'm am now very thoroughly convinced that
it is not a heat/cooling problem or bad RAM.
Thank you for any help you might be able to offer me, I hope that I've
provided all the information you'd need.
Joe Pranevich