Hello,

I have an Alpha Multia 166MHz that I've managed to get the 1.2 port
running on, and things were working great for about 20 days or so (20
days uptime no less).

Then, all of a sudden, the machine decided that it could stay alive
for no more than 5 minutes, ever.

It crashes randomly in the following ways:

1. locks up solid
2. cold resets itself with no warning (straight back to the boot prom)
3. In single user mode sometimes it freezes but the cursor will still
   move around
4. Sometimes it panics (I see panic: .. for 0.003 seconds, then it resets)
5. Sometimes it panics properly and I get messages like:

panic: machine check: vec 0x670, pc=0x205C0, ra=0xfffffc000024dae0
syncing disks... done
dumping to dev 801, offset 111664
dump device bad

rebooting...

(then it doesn't reboot, or else i wouldn't have had time to write all
 this down)

The only thing in common with these events is they usually occur 2-10
minutes after boot up, usually faster if I try to do more "things"
(like start X, copy files, or otherwise type things in on the
keyboard), and if I'm doing "things" when it dies, it tends to do #1
most often, while if i'm not doing things, #5 is more likely to occur
(but #5 is still unusual, its usually #1 or #2 in most cases).

Even if I do absolutely nothing, just leave it in single user mode
it still freezes up after 2-10 minutes (this is a rough time estimate,
I wasn't watching the clock or anything).

I'm using the generic kernel that comes with the distribution of 1.2.

I no longer have the NT software that came preinstalled, so I can't
test another OS on it to see if it makes a difference.

My guess is that some piece of hardware has flaked out and the thing
is now a doorstop, but I'm hoping otherwise.  If anybody has any ideas
here, I'd greatly appreciate your help!


One other question on a totally unrelated subject; does anyone have an
estimate as to how many netbsd-alpha users there are?

-- 
                                                                Erik Rungi
                                                        rungus@openface.ca