Crashes and lock-ups in Sarge

[Felix Karpfen <felixk@webone.com.au>]

Since October 2005 I have  been experiencing repeated crashes and
lock-ups - of varying degrees of seriousness.

Initially, I attributed these to some software incompatibilities and
sought advice in the relevant "users groups".

And was advised that it sounded like a "hardware problem" - my HD was
on its way out.

Each subsequent crash re-enforced this diagnosis; so I have purchased
and installed a new HD (and a new cable - just in case).  "Debian 3.1
r1" should be arriving within the next few days and my main remaining
question appeared to be:

"Do I start from scratch or copy my existing setup to the new HD
before it dies and refuses to be revived"

when I read the following in

http://www.seismo.ethz.ch/linux/debian_software_installation.html:


,----[ ext3_error.txt ]-
| Possible Problems with ext3 Journaling filesystem 
| 
| On one of our PCs, running Kernel 2.6.8, we had a problem during
| mid-October 2004: In the file /var/log/messages we see entries like:
| 
| Oct 16 02:43:08 og kernel: hda: dma_intr: status=0x51 { DriveReady SeekComplete Error }
| Oct 16 02:43:08 og kernel: hda: dma_intr: error=0x84 { DriveStatusError BadCRC }
| 
| When switching to console mode (cntl-alt-F1), we see something like:
| EXT3-fs error (device hda6) in start_transaction: Journal has aborted
| 
| What helped, was booting with a Knoppix-CD, then enter su - to become
| root and afterwards enter cat /etc/fstab in order to see, what
| partitions were detected. In our case, the partition where Debian linux
| was running before and has caused problems with the ext3 file system, a
| filesystem check was done as follows: fsck /dev/hda6. The journal file
| was obviously re-created and things worked smooth after a reboot.
| 
| Mhh... 10 days later we have the same problem, but this time Knoppix
| cannot create a file /etc/fstab - could this be due to a hardware
| problem? Disk failure? We shut down the PC for one day and were then
| successful in booting it with Knoppix, did a fsck /dev/hda6 and the
| machine booted again.
`----


Given that I get virtually identical failure messages when I run
"fsck -cc" on my suspect <drive|partitions>, I would be interested in
expert comments before I take my next step.

Felix Karpfen

-- 
Felix Karpfen