Unreliable Fedora 7, Mysterious Crashes

[Kam Leo]

On 9/26/07, David Hough <fedora at llondel.org> wrote:
> I'm trying to work out what's wrong with one of my Fedora 7 systems. It
> suffers random seizures, sometimes completely locking up, other times
> apparently suffering partial lock-ups of one or two windows (as in they
> won't update the screen when clicked but others still work), followed
> shortly by a complete lock-up. Sometimes when locked up I can still ping
> it, although attempting ssh gets in but never provides a prompt (but see
> below). On reboot there's no clue in the syslog. The previous FC6
> installation was rock-solid. Running a Xen kernel or VMWare (not on a
> Xen kernel) seems to guarantee a crash much faster than if I don't run
> either.
>
> Initial thoughts were about the Evil nVidia Binary Driver, but I swapped
> the graphics card for an ATI one and I still get lock-ups, so
> uninstalling the nVidia driver didn't fix it. I've left it running
> memtest overnight and it was quite happy.
>
> Another clue this morning was that I did manage to get an ssh shell from
> another machine, but it then objected to various commands with an
> input/output error.
>
> The machine spec is Fedora 7 on a 2.4GHz Core 2 Duo running on an Abit
> AB9 Pro motherboard. 4GB RAM, currently an ATI HD2600 graphics card,
> previously an nVidia GS7600 card. Three SATA drives (independent, no
> RAID), a SATA DVD and a Brainbox dual serial card. It's been through
> several kernels with the problem, currently claiming to be
> 2.6.22.5-76.fc7 #1 SMP Thu Aug 30 13:47:21 EDT 2007 and everything else
> maintained using yum update. System temperatures seem to be fine, CPU
> runs about 50C even when exercised.
>
> I have Fedora 7 on a Dell laptop and an Athlon machine and they're both
> quite happy. I still sort of suspect the graphics driver but have no
> real proof of it.
>

Choose VESA and test again.