RH 7.3 Locking Up - Help!

[Victor Odhner]

Hi, folks.  I need some diagnostic tips here.

Tonight I have found that I can no longer work
under RH 7.3 on my dual-boot system.  It keeps
locking up, very early into each session,
whether working in X or at the console prompt.
Win98SE is running fine.

I think I'm always hitting the disk when it
happens.  The mouse and keyboard stop
responding to all input, and the reset
button is the only way out.

X is running in every case, but I can hang it
without even logging onto X, instead working
in a console window.  In that case, my lockups
generally happen when I CD to a different
volume, or once when I tried to mount one.
In many cases this is a VFAT or FAT-32 volume,
because I have all my Win98 volumes mounted.

I'm running three IDE drives.  Because I had
to shut it off rudely, I ran the "File System
Integrity Check" which went through all my
mounted volumes.  The Linux volumes are Ext3.
I also went over to Windows and ran Scandisk
on all three physical drives, though not on
all partitions.  No sign of disk trouble.

I'm guessing some sort of kernel corruption.

I have very, very little time to tinker
with the system, so this is killing me.

Ideas on how I can diagnose this?

I'm thinking that installing RH 8.0 might
possibly overcome the problem.  That's a
very Redmondian Voodoo approach, but I
have no ideas at this point.

Vic

http://members.cox.net/vodhner/
   -- or --
http://www.newearth.org/~victor/resume.html