ECS K7S5A bus problem may be causing file corruption

[Tom Zych]

(Apologies for munged address, I don't have a good spam solution
yet.  No need to CC me.)

There appears to be a marginal bus problem with some ECS K7S5A
boards, which may be contributing to some of the file corruption
problems people have reported.  Try running Memtest86
( http://www.memtest86.com/ ) with the CPU (and possibly FSB)
speed set to 100, then 133.  If 100 is ok and 133 isn't, check out
http://65.66.90.193/K7S5A_Corruption_Fix_V131.pdf (warning: pdf)
for details.  My own machine exhibits completely reproducible
errors using either or both DIMMS when the CPU/FSB speed is
133/133, and no errors at 100/100 or 100/133.

Memtest86 is run from a boot floppy and doesn't use the hard
drives, so this is unrelated to the kernel / IDE.  A couple of
people have had trouble under Linux but not Windows, so this may
not be the only issue.  It should be eliminated on a given machine
before testing kernel patches, though.

Hope this helps,
-- 
Tom Zych
[e-mail]