Dell Dimension XPS 200n
Intel FX motherboard with Pentium Pro/200
128 MB RAM in 4 72-pin SIMMs
1 IDE hard drive serving as root filesystem
Intel EtherExpress Pro ISA Ethernet card
Diamond FirePort 40. Attached:
Iomega Jaz 1 GB removable cartridge drive (external)
Seagate 5 GB HDD (internal)
20x CD-ROM (internal)
4x Matshita CD-R (internal)
Symptoms are that the root disk becomes corrupted, such as
getting corrupt, strange file entries (nonsensical permissions
and ext2 attributes). This has happened twice now, to the extent
that the system had to be reinstalled. The first time it was
with kernel 2.0.36, the second time with 2.2.12.
Fsck has failed to help, as might be expected with hardware
corruption. In fact it segfaults with SIGSEGV (signal 11).
Apparently, the corruption only happens on the IDE disk, but the
IDE disk is the most heavily used disk, so that might simply be
luck.
At first this system had trouble with memory usage and
detection, but it was fixed by turning off the BIOS option for
15-16MB memory hole (might not be exact name).
Does anyone have a suggestion as to what might be wrong? Is this
likely a hardware problem? (What kind?) Is it possible that the
options for the IDE disk are set to wrong values? hdparm hasn't
been used, so I would expect that the defaults would be safe, but
I don't know for sure.
I am hesitant to blame the kernel now that it has happened under
two different versions of the kernel.
Thanks in advance,
Ben.
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