My main Workstation sauna crashed several times. Sometimes It just reboots, sometimes it hangs. There are several suspects. The Harddrive, because sometimes before it freezes, there are some messages, that the Harddisk timed out. The RAM, because it was the last piece that changed and the electrolytic capacitors, since i read an article in this weeks c’t magazine and the symptoms look similar. I started debugging by removing 512MB of RAM.
After several commits from S�ren to the new ATA driver I rebuilt world on my CURRENT box polly. The Kernel now detected my Harddrives but paniced seconds later while loading the vlan-module. But during reboot there were again strange error messages from the ata subsystem and after the BIOS reinitialized, it didn’t found the bootloader *grrrrrrr*. Today I have to look for floppies to reinstall the bootloader.