[OT] Kernel Panic - What's your diagnosis

[John V. Pope]

> Subject: [OT] Kernel Panic - What's your diagnosis
> Date: Tue, 20 Jan 2004 16:35:02 +0800
> From: "Ow Mun Heng" <ow.mun.heng at wdc.com>
> To: "Fedora-List (E-mail)" <fedora-list at redhat.com>
> Reply-To: fedora-list at redhat.com
>
> Hi All,
>
> [Disclaimer: This is on a RH8 system. Mailing to this list since there's
> more
>  experts here.]
>
> Last night, my Linux Server experienced a kernel panic. I'm not
> really sure what happened. /var/log/messeges did not show anything very
> informative. (maybe my syslog.conf file is not very good(?))
>
> On The system console, this is what is written
>
> CPU0 : Machine Check Exception 000000000000004
> Bank3 : b200000000080a01
> Kernel Panic : CPU Context Currupt
> in Interrupt handler_not syncing
>
> The above was the only thing I seen. Memory Problems? This Server is an
old
> Junk PII 300Mhz on 512MB Ram & 3x200GB IDE drive & it's actually running
on
> RH8 (sorry.. I know it's the wrong list)
>
> At the time it was Hung, I think the system was running rsyncd. I'm not
sure
> if it hung because of Rsync or (?). Maybe the server was hacked(?) I
highly
> doubt so though.
>
> Thanks for any and all help.
>
> Cheers,                                                 .^.
> Mun Heng, Ow                                            /V\
> H/M Engineering                                       /(   )\
> Western Digital M'sia                                  ^^-^^
> DID : 03-7870 5168                          The Linux Advocate
Ow,

I have direct experience with that exact problem.  The CPU is doing an mce
due to a bus error.  It also happened to one of my systems with RH8 (and RH9
since I upgraded to try to fix it).

I took weeks to finally find the actual problem (it was very intermittent)
but the long and short of it was a bad DIMM chip.  To find the problem I
created a boot floppy with memtest86 on it and it the bad RAM was detected
on the first
pass.

The FC1 install disk has memtest86 on it but I've never used it.

Good luck,
John V. Pope