System Freezing

For some years I've had troubles with system freezes with everything from 10.0 to 10.3 (x86_64) - right now it's 10.2. It's persisted through three motherboards. I've been thinking it's hard drives (two PATA two SATA) since I believe I've heard rumors that there is sometimes SATA/PATA incompatabilities. This morning is typical (except usually no response to ctrl-alt-bksp or alt-sysrq-REISUB):

(I leave my desktop on 24/7)
black screen on monitor except for window of Thunderbird (the only open window, left up overnight)
ctrl-alt-backspace erases screen leaving white nonblinking cursor in upper left corner
alt-sysreq-REISUB reboots
GRUB error 21 on reboot
push reset switch
GRUB error 21 on reboot
power down for 5 seconds
reboot OK

It's the *intermittent* GRUB 21 error (and occasionally GRUB 17) that makes me think it's a hard drive - GRUB is in the default location, which I believe is the MBR of hda. I think that's the only place BIOS knows to look?

Does this sound like anything to anyone?
Thanks,
Patti :unsure:

a quick scout here http://www.linuxselfhelp.com/gnu/grub/html...er/grub_13.html appears it could be a hdd problem

Andy

Hi Andy! Hey, thanks for the great resource - I'm going to print that out! I was erroneously recalling Error 21 to be a "can't find file" error for GRUB. Patti

Andy - I meant to ask if there's a logfile that grub writes its errors to so I can see which disk "doesn't exist?" Noting looked obvious in /boot/grub...
THANKS!!
Patti :unsure:

have a look in YaST- miscellaneous - system log, lots to discover in there

Andy

have a look in YaST- miscellaneous - system log, lots to discover in there
Andy
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Thanks again, Andy! Turns out the source of the problem was a power supply! Brownouts, I guess, rather than an outright failure. I replaced it and all seemed to be fixed. But I went ahead and sunk $120 into a 500GB SATA drive so I can consolidate all OS's onto a single hard drive - no more mixed SATA/PATA for me, thank you. Patti

Excellent, glad you got it sorted,now enjoy

Andy