The page at www.bitwizard.nl includes many good ideas about possible
hardware failures. I did the following without any results:
booted with mem=8M to use only half of the 16M
switched the two SIMMS in the same bank (I don't know how the SIMMs are
arranged in the address space.)
disabled external cache
disabled internal cache
set DRAM memory timing to the slowest X444 (read and write)
Then I tried changing the CPU clock to 50MHz X 1.5 = 75MHz. The CPU is
marked as an AMD-K5-P100, and the settings were 66MHz X 1.5 = 100MHz. I
had two successful kernel builds after that. Compiling takes much
longer now. I'm setting the machine to run 100 kernel builds saving the
outputs to different files, while I go out. I'll be trying 60MHz x 1.5
= 90MHz for that.
My system's problem could be either a bad BIOSTAR-8500TVX or a bad
AMD-K5-P100. Have I eliminated the memory and cache yet? What about
the PCI EIDE controller with two 504Mbyte drives connected?
Only three more days to return the motherboard, CPU or memory . . .
-- Victor Vaughn <vvaughn@wizard.net>