IN> First time the emacs binary got corrupted, and cmp'ing it with a
IN> good copy revealed a single almost contiguous 3 kbyte range which
IN> had any differences -- looks like a single page. I restored the
IN> binary, then two days later the same thing happend to perl. This
IN> time I replaced the kernel with one which had Triton support, and
IN> did hdparm -u 1. No problems since.
IN> There were some reports of "hda IRQ timeout" in the logs at the
IN> time. Filesystem structure was okay; fsck didn't complain.
Are you using power saving on the hard drive?
I've seen similar corruption in Windows 95 when a disk was too slow at
spinning up. Now admittedly that doesn't apply to linux, but it could
be hardware.
The machine in question has an ASUS XP55T2P4 (Triton HX) mainboard and
(among others) a Quantum Bigfoot disk. Disabling power saving "solved"
the problem.
Benny