RH 7.3 Locking Up - Help!

No response from the list after some 35 hours.
I'm still twisting in the wind with this one.
Any ideas, anyone?

-------- Original Message --------
Subject: RH 7.3 Locking Up - Help!
Date: Sat, 12 Oct 2002 20:55:22 -0700
From: Victor Odhner <vodhner@cox.net>
Reply-To: plug-discuss@lists.plug.phoenix.az.us
To: plug-discuss@lists.plug.phoenix.az.us

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.

I sent this as a separate follow-up message:
Note -- I just ran in single-user mode to save
my work over to a Windows partition, and there
was no problem with that session: cd, mount -a,
editing on fstab, all went fine.

Vic

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