#3 Freezes when accessing two HDDs

[Yongtao Yang]

Why my SuSE8.1 system freezes randomly?

Reason:
You are using reiserfs or ext3 filesystem and haveing
partitions over more than one hard disks. SuSE had
applied a patch to the stock kernel-2.4.19, which broke
the IDE driver. When the freeze happens, you will not
be able to see any error messages in system log file,
but you probably can see some error on the xconsole
like "kernel opps' just before the freeze.

Possible solutions:

1. If you are using reiserfs, then edit your
/etc/fstab, change the line of the reiserfs partition from

"[....]defaults" to "[...]defaults,barrier=none"

2. If you are using ext3, you could try to download and
install
k_*-2.4.18 package from
ftp://ftp.suse.com/pub/people/mantel/test/

links:
http://lists.suse.com/archive/suse-linux-e/2002-Nov/3799.html
http://lists.suse.com/archive/suse-linux-e/2002-Nov/3869.html
http://lists.suse.com/archive/suse-linux-e/2002-Nov/3895.html
http://lists.suse.com/archive/suse-linux-e/2002-Nov/3907.html