Bob Blick wrote:
> I'm having trouble on a computer, every few minutes certain things stop
> for 5 seconds. Specifically, anything that needs the hard drive has to
> wait.
>
> /var/log/messages shows lines that correspond to these events, like this:
>
> Dec 11 14:59:23 ctc kernel: hda: lost interrupt

Bob,

I'd try pulling the network card.  See if it continues to do it without
the Tulip card on the PCI bus.  They're kinda notorious for being cheap,
but 99.9% of the time they do "just work".

The drive could be failing.  You could also test hammering the disk I/O
with something like hdparm speed tests and/or bonnie and see if it gets
worse or other error messages pop up to give other clues.

Another good check would probably be to boot to single user mode and
force an fsck if you're using an ext2/3 filesystem on all your partitions.

The fact that it's so variable in time suggests that something else on
the bus is messing around intermittantly.  If you have spare IDE cables
lying around it might be worth swapping them out just to see.  Reseating
everything probably wouldn't hurt either...

I'd do some Googling with your specific drive part number and
motherboard type to see if anyone else experiences the problem.  Also,
2.4.20 is pretty "new" but there's been a couple of revs of 2.4 after
that... might be worth slapping a newer kernel on if the box is using a
package manager that makes it simple to do.

Good luck,

Nate, nate@natetech.com

p.s. A quick google search found a guy who's had a machine doing this
for 4 years who can't find it, but the warnings he's received about the
drive failing have never come true.  If you were getting another error
like this guy:
http://lists.slug.org.au/archives/slug/2002/04/msg00313.html
I'd say maybe the disk is starting to fail... but not always...

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