For the 2nd time in about a month my system has hung while trying to access the disk. The first time the performance gradually deteriorated, and when I switch to a virtual console (if that's the lingo: ctl-alt-F1) I saw lots of errors about being unable to access the hard drive. It became completely unresponsive and I had to turn off the power.
I opened the case, reseated the connectors, and all was well. Though I've noticed some similar slowings over the last few days, this time it just hung. I believe that the disk had been powered down. When I went to access it the access light just stayed on. I saw no error messages when I switch to vt1, but when I tried to switch back I just had blank screen. Hiting the restart button got me to the BIOS start screens, where it stopped. I powered down and restarted (without opening the case). Again, all is well. I have not had this problem while under other OS's on the same machine. I'm running woody with kernel 2.4.2 built from the kernel source package. The disks are IDE; my main working disk is Maxtor13G, with 33 as its peak xfer rate (this is from my memory). I have a Gigabyte GA 71XE4 motherboard, with AMD chips (756 is probably the relevant one). Athlon 800 MHz CPU. Is this any kind of a known kernel problem? Or does it ring any bells? The symptoms make me suspect this is a software problem, though perhaps that's being optimistic. Thanks.
