system instablity

[Dan hursh <hursh@sparc.isl.net>]

Hi all,

    I'm asking here because I'm hoping someone might have a nicer
diagnosis for what I'm seeing.  I had been running a debian hamm
installation that I had upgraded with no trouble until I had a disk
failure.  I verified it was the hard drive that was hosed.

    Anyhow, I recent bought hamm on CD and installed again on a different
drive.  I've had a few odd problems here and there but nothing unusual
until the past couple of days.  I have been seeing dpkg die with odd perl
syntax errors, seg-faults, etc.  Other programs such as netscape 4.05,
emacs, smailconfig, and kfm (and many other I can't remember) have been
dieing with illegal operations, segs, and bus errors.

  The problems will be repeatable for a short time, and then the program
will behave, or exhibit a new and interesting problem.  I know linux and
the software I'm using is more stable than this.  I guess I'm wondering if
anyone know if there may have been problems with the official cd image?  I
would image that the problems I'm see would have been fixed if it were the
software.  I guess another question would be, does anyone have any idea
which hardware is most likely to cause this without crashing the whole OS?  
Judging by the randomness of the error, I'm guessing not the CPU.  Maybe a
bad spot in memory?

    I'm running hamm pretty much out of the box still.  I have not
compiled my own kernel yet.  I'm not using any new hardware.  This has all
work within the last month.  If anyone has any idea's, I'd appreciate it.

Thanks,
Dan Hursh
hursh@infonet.isl.net