Kernel panic - not syncing

[scoonma]

Okay, I put this in the Cooker section, but I wonder wether it really belongs here. My AMD 2700+ / nforce2 based machine produces machine check exceptions in a very irregular way (i.e. not reproducable, can't find any pattern until now). The problem got worse within last week, actually I cannot even boot with a "normal" 2.6.17.11 series kernel. Being in X, the machine freezes left to reboot using MagicSysRq key, when in terminal mode I can see at least the error message. Sometimes I'm left to use the reset button.

 

I've made hardware tests thoroughly (Knoppix memtest etc.), but nothing is found. The machine is dual boot, and I can run Win2000 for hours without any problems. So I doubt this is hardware related, however this is suggested in many forums for this type of error. There's no overclocking or heat problem, too: System runs at normal speed and sometimes freezes even after half a day being off.

 

I suspect some aspect of udev or similar, but not really having a clue. The error occurs sometimes very early during boot (before root fs is being mounted), so I presume it's an aspect also going into initramdisk. I've tried several kernels, too, but they reproduce the annoying behaviour with just slightly different flavour/variation.

 

Now I know it's cooker, being unstable as such, but I'm playing around with cooker versions for some time, and there had never been such a strange behaviour that bad. Anyone else with similar experiences, or (hopefully) hints?

 

Regards,

 

scoonma

[arctic]

Check if there is any hint on what causes the crashes in your /var/log/messages file. And check Mandrivas bugtracker http://qa.mandriva.com/