It is possible this error is caused by a misconfiguration of the DDR RAM modules on the Asus A7M266-D motherboard (mobo). I'll post a follow-up to this comment once I'm sure this is the solution.
The mobo has 3 of a possible 4 PC2100 (unbuffered) modules installed. Memtest revealed a series of 'test-5' failures but moving the modules around didn't isolate one module. Two DDR modules had been removed from this mobo and inserted in another identical mobo, and a spare module was installed. The installed modules are: 512, 512, 256; giving a total of 1280MB. During boot the BIOS summary display usually disappears before it can be read but during one boot sequence I pressed 'Pause'. I noticed that the SDRAM slot report showed 2,3,4 rather than 1,2,3 as I would expect. Examining the mobo manual and then the mobo itself revealed that slot-1 was empty. Slot-1 is nearest to the CPUs. The mobo isn't marked, so when the 2 modules were removed they were taken from slots 1 & 2. I swapped the modules around, rebooted, and reran Memtest several times and it didn't detect any failures. The server was rebooted and didn't crash in 19 hours. At that point it was restarted to test an install of Ubuntu 6.10 Server Edgy Eft Beta. Note: Asus A7M266-D manual states that the mobo will support either: four (4) Registered DDR DIMMs (64MB - 3.5GB) two (2) unbuffered DDR DIMMs (64MB - 2GB) So running this mobo with more than 2 unbuffered modules could cause data corruption due to the load on the system bus. Something to be aware of of you're wanting to pack it with RAM. However, I've been running these mobos with 4 unbuffered Crucial-branded 512MB DDR DIMMs for several years without problems. -- <3>BUG: soft lockup detected on CPU#1! https://launchpad.net/bugs/63165 -- ubuntu-bugs mailing list ubuntu-bugs@lists.ubuntu.com https://lists.ubuntu.com/mailman/listinfo/ubuntu-bugs
