kernel panic, 2.4.7 (Redhat 7.2) and i don't know why

[initially i posted this message to linux.kernel until i found out that this was a mailinglist-to-newsgroup thing. so i think the message never reached the list and it is okay to repost this message.]

Dear linux kernel mailing list,

our company has an IBM netfinity 866 MHz server with two IBM 30 GB SCSI disks doing a RAID-1 (mirroring). the machine is running Redhat 7.2 (kernel 2.4.7-10).

when i set up the machine in january i suspected a hardware damage on one of the two HDDs. IBM checked and returned me the _same_ disks saying they were okay (i don't know if they fixed anything).

after this the server crashed about once in every 30 days (in total three times). yesterday it crashed again (the UPS ran out of power due to a failure in the public electricity network). i booted as usual but within the next two hours the server kept on crashing (in total four times).

the register dump was very similar each time. i checked at Google but could not find anything. maybe somebody can clear things up?

esi: d083a000 edi: 00000000 ebp: 00000000 esp: c0257bec
ds: 0018 es: 0018 ss:0018
Process swapper (pid:0, stackpage=c0257000) [stack contents, etc]

Code: 8b 07 0f b6 40 19 eb 05 b8 ff 00 00 00 50 31 ff 6a ff 55 0f

<0> Kernel panic: Aiee, killing interrupt handler! Interrupt handler - not synching

the esi, edi, ebp, esp contents was the same in two crashes (yesterday). ds, es, ss, process swapper and code were the same in all four crashes (yesterday).

i have no idea what all these numbers mean. :-(

as a quick fix i took out the SCSI disk i (still) suspect to be damaged. since then we did not have any problems. but the server is only up for 19 hours so i don't know what is yet to come ...

could you recommend me how to test the other HDD for errors? i am not really familiar with filesystem check issues in Linux.

i really hope somebody has some kind of answers or advice how to handle this problem.

btw, could you please send a CC to my email address as i am not subscribed to the kernel mailing list. thank you.

greetings from Quito,

Henrik Mitsch

Teleholding S.A. - http://www.teleholding.com
Departamento de Proyectos
Email: [email protected]
Teléfono: (593 2) 2560 600 - 125
Beeper: (02) 2555 000 (a nombre de: Teleholding - Henrik Mitsch)