On Fri, Jul 31, 2009 at 8:07 PM, Trent Shipley <tshipley@deru.com> wrote:


Memtest86 passed.

So far people have also suggested the cause as hardware
incompatibility, hard drive issues, BIOS (Dell's site does recommend
updating the BIOS for my motherboard but their program won't run from
a CD and I couldn't figure out how to make a bootable DOS flash
drive), usb drive/video card/other card/any peripheral, acpi (I think
this issue is fixed in newer versions of Ubuntu), and my personal
theory that the problem is fundamentally caused by an incompatible
combination of software and hardware.  Software-hardware problems
would explain why over several kernel iterations some are stable and
run beautifully while others won't boot.   Without the boot log it's
all superstitious guess work.  If I had another Linux machine I'd do
surgery and mount the problem system's drive to read the log.

I think RedSeven is going to get some of my money.

Trent,

I read back through your posts and two things I have not seen from you are:

1) any details about your hardware other than it being a Dell (model, memory, disk space, etc)
2) do you need to retain any files/data from the system for which you don't have backups

Please provide that information.

Depending on the answers and how quickly you need to get this resolved, you might not have to go to the expense of a professional repair shop.  If necessary we might be able to get together to work on this.  Too bad we did not have it to work on at the installfest.  You said near ASU West.  Are you a student?

--
Dazed_75 a.k.a. Larry

The spirit of resistance to government is so valuable on certain occasions, that I wish it always to be kept alive.
 - Thomas Jefferson