PROBLEM: 2.4.19-pre4-ac3 (ide?) freeze

Hi! I am running kernel 2.4.19-pre4-ac3 with the preempt patch. I finally got everything working after some experimentation (Maxtor Promise ATA133 controller with new 160GB hard drive).

However, the kernel seems to freeze up after a few hours. Any copy operations, etc stop, and it seems to be unable to start new processses. When I use SysRq+9, I keep getting hda: lost interrupt messages. (hda is the drive I am booting from, not on the Promise controller.) This has happened two or three times so far, but it seems to have caused a worse problem the last time.

Now, whenever I try to bootup with that root partition, whether using the new kernel or an older one, I get messages like INIT: cannot execute /sbin/agetty. I have run e2fsck, with no major problems, tried replacing files and binaries (init, inittab, agetty, etc) with known working copies from another partition, but to no avail. When I try passing init=/bin/sh or init=/bin/bash to the kernel, it gives an error about not being able to locate an init program and to try passing init= to the kernel. If I boot up with another partition, I can run binaries (agetty, bash, etc) just fine. I checked my fstab and it seems to be fine. I also tried copying everything to another partition and booting with that, but had the same problem.

I realize that this second problem may not directly be related to the kernel, but I am mentioning it because it seems to have been caused by the kernel freeze (and the fact that I am desperate for help :) ).

I am not adverse to a kernel upgrade, but would like to avoid it unless the freezing is either a known problem with this kernel or there is a likelihood that one of the updates in a newer kernel may have fixed the problem.

I would also appreciate any suggestions on how to be able to boot my partition again as otherwise I have no way to get full access to my computer. My other partition has a problem in the fstab that makes fsck try to check a nonexistant drive, making it boot read-only and single-user. I have no way to edit this as I need the ide-patch to access this drive and I don't know any rescue disks that support this.

I would appreciate any help/suggestions for either of these problems. :) I am not attaching my .config because this is my first post to this list and I'm not sure if it would be appropriate, but I would be happy to do so if requested. A few things off the top of my head: No I/O or Local APIC (no idea what they are but they caused problems), no ACPI (conflicted with Promise controller), and I'm pretty sure I have the new Taskfile access enabled.

Thanks a lot!

Sincerely,
Pritpaul Mahal

P.S. I would appreciate a CC of any replies to me, as I am not subscribed to the list. However, I will check the archives for replies, so it's not really necessary, just don't flame me. :-P

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