Comment 5 for bug 204451

After many days of frustration with this machine, I now believe that this crash is principally due to hardware/configuration failure instead of software, and this bug report should potentially be closed off.

The Motherboard BIOS settings were somehow corrupted and changed without my actually doing this, and this appeared to occur randomly on reboot. In the latest instance, not only was the CPU underclocked (bad Memory Bus timings - 100Mhz instead of 200Mhz), but the PCI Bus timing was set to Manual, and was overclocked to 75Mhz instead of the default 66Mhz. If this was the case during the above faults, it would definitely lead to issues with valid data availability on the PCI bus, and could lead to other lockup issues, which, while they are reproducible, are not due to application software. The probable effect was that the AGP Video card (nVidia) could cope with the faster bus, but the sound card was entirely unable to and caused the fault.

Replacing the CMOS Battery, cleaning and rebuilding the machine, and reconfiguring the BIOS correctly to proper defaults has now "solved" this problem. The machine does not exhibit this failure anymore, without any software changes made, other than applying the most recent 8.04 updates. Very strange that the CMOS checksum did not fail in any of these conditions ... so I'm not entirely sure what or why this was happening, and/or if there is a fault in the BIOS itself. Will research further independently.