Disk problems

[bbb at it.net.au]

Hello all.
I am having infuriating problems with RH9. If some people could suggest
actions or other sources of help

Thanking you in advance

Running P55T2P4 with most recent bios (0207-2 J.2 patch). The machine is
not overclocked, merely running a Pentium 200

Seagate 40GB hard drive as slave drive on machine

On install attempt for RH9, constant lock up on "format" section (always at
%11)

Investigation reveals problems with mke2fs

Have partitioned the disk into 

hdd1	ext3		18.6 GB
hdd2	vfat (FAT 32)	18.6 GB

fdisk reports hdd as having 40.0 GB

mke2fs

results in success (occasionally)

Very often
	success in writing inode tables
	success in writing superblock and accounting information

But the system just freezes, no error messages and keyboard does not respond.

Often have screen full of error messages finishing with "Bad EIP Value"
I can not capture this message on to disk. The machine has as above, to be
reset, the keyboard does not work

Occasionally, on completion returns Code (Hex Values) "Segmentation fault".
The machine remains operational. If I attempt to rerun mke2fs, the system
hangs, but can be reset with the keyboard.

e2fsk -v 

repeats above scenario with the same frequent errors and lock ups.

occasionally resulting in no errors found reporting a clean file system

e2fsk -vf

Occasioally works through its 5 passes and returns information as expected


I can not find fault with the drive, seagate utilities reveals no problem
with the disk and it works well in another machine.

Barry