For some obscure reasons the BIOS my new MSI-6570 K7N2 Delta enables the 'Halt Disconnect and Stop Grant Disconnect' bit of the nForce2 chipset. It enables what has been called "Athlon Powersaving". Unfortunately it also introduces random freezes during both SCSI and IDE disk operations. I have been able to produce these system freezes by using fsck.ext3 on both SCSI and IDE disks. This has been demonstrated by the kernels:
kernel-2.4.21.0.13mdk kernel-enterprise-2.4.21-0.rc1.1mdk kernel-enterprise-2.4.21.6mdk My solution has been to insert athcool off in rc.local However, I have just discovered that it can also freeze during the boot process of kernel-enterprise-2.4.22.0.1mdk The "solution" is to repeat the boot, but the real solution will be to disable this bit as early as possible in the boot process. -- Bjarne Thomsen Bjarne Thomsen <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> Institute of Physics & Astronomy
