The hard drive controller is actually on the hard drive itself - not the mobo. Whichever drive is the master for the channel controls the whole channel. I think your thinking of the Bus Master IDE Controller. > -----Original Message----- > From: owner-kclug@marauder.illiana.net > [mailto:owner-kclug@marauder.illiana.net]On Behalf Of Brian Kelsay > Sent: Thursday, March 13, 2003 3:49 PM > To: kclug@kclug.org > Subject: Unexplained Segmentation Faults > > > Like Chris said, check to see that the /var is not full. If you have a > hardware failure it is more likely to be in the chipset on the motherboard. > I think it is the North Bridge that contains the hard drive controller. > Put another drive in the system with a fresh OS load. Any OS. And see if > you get write errors still. > I had this problem with a users' Pentium 4 PC (6 months old) running Windows > XP. I replaced the drive and ghosted a fresh image to the PC. On first > reboot after ghost I got a blue screen of Death with kernel errors. I > tried to load from CD to eleminate the networking element and got the same > result. I replaced the motherboard and it was doing the same thing. Safe > mode didn't help, but did point out that the last driver loaded was a module > for the AGP set. So next I replaced the motherboard again and also the > video card. I should have replaced one thing at a time to prove which it > was, but I was in a hurry and had the parts from the OEM so one of the two > things fixed it. > You can also remove all cards, but the video and unplug CD and floppy and > any non-essential devices, add one thing at a time until the problem > reappears. This method can help with any hardware troubleshooting. > Hope it helps. > Brian > > ----- Original Message ----- > From: "James Colannino" > > > > > Hey everyone. I've had some problems with an old machine of mine for a > > while. I have a P200 MMX running Slackware 8.1 that's worked very well > > so far. The BIOS is able to recognize all 13GB of my HD which I've > > found to be quite rare with such an old machine, and it seemed for a > > while to be pretty stable. > > > > However, everytime I try to run "updatedb" so that I can locate files, > > it works for a few minutes and then always without fail will give me a > > segmentation fault. Then, if I've attempted that command, everytime I > > halt or restart the system, it'll give me a segmentation fault as it's > > unmounting all remote filesystems (I don't actually have any -- I'm > > planning on removing all references to nfs from the system.) If I > > haven't tried to updatedb, it halts and restarts without any problems. > > > > After I've gotten one segmentation fault from running the command > > "updatedb," from now on, until I reboot the system, it doesn't even work > > the Hard Drive at all before I get the same error, this time saying > > something about a NULL Pointer. > > > > This is really frustrating me. I'm pretty sure from other observations > > I've made that excessive writing (and/or reading -- not sure) to the > > disk is what's producing these errors. > > > > Now for my question. Do you think maybe the processor is bad, or do you > > think maybe there's something wrong with the IDE controllers? This is > > kind of an odd problem. I'm certain that the disk is good. I've had > > very good luck with it thus far (of course I'll probably plunk it in > > another system and give it a good diagnostical checkup to make sure.) I > > tried running the processor at 166 Mhz as opposed to 200 Mhz in a vain > > attempt to see if maybe for some reason the CPU was overheating, but > > that I see is most likely not the problem. I did over clock it once to > > 233 Mhz, and had the segmentation faults start occuring (this was before > > I'd used the system pretty much at all though,) so I originally thought > > that maybe I over heated the CPU and thus set it back to 200. It seemed > > to work alright, but it's still producing these errors (only when I use > > the disk a great deal though.) Very strange. Any ideas? > > > > James > > >