(thanks in advance for any comments, etc.) I have been having a number of scary boot situations with my primary work system. The system has booted at times and acted like it could not find the drives. I then shut it down for a while and then ... it finds the drives and boots without a problem. Overheating? I do not think so as I have spaced the drives a fair distance a part to prevent an over heating issue. Plenty or air flow in the system as well. There are also instances when the system just crashes for no apparent reason - this is not good. (see error messages below system description) Any particular reason why the system may not find the drives it needs to boot? Or ... has problems in knowing what to do when it boots? ++++ system description +++++ Software: Fedora Core 5 (FC5) Hardware: Dual Xeon Asus MB, 3.2 GHz, 533 MHz FSB 4 GB RAM 4 250 GB SATA Drives Hard drive configuration (to the best of my knowledge) The system is set up with software Raid level 1. Logical volume groups to basically give one large drive Raid is set up for /boot, /swap, and / All of this was set up during installation, not after the fact. I have not tried booting it from the second boot partition, say for example to test the system as if it crashed on the boot drive. I think i still need to copy some files across. I bought new hardware in all situations and a good power supply. I did not skimp as this is my main work computer. ++++ end of system description ++++ Error messages previously found. +++ previous error messages ++++++ Message from syslogd at localhost at Tue Jul 18 12:20:33 2006 ... localhost kernel: Oops: 0002 [#1] Message from syslogd at localhost at Tue Jul 18 12:20:33 2006 ... localhost kernel: SMP Message from syslogd at localhost at Tue Jul 18 12:20:33 2006 ... localhost kernel: CPU: 3 Message from syslogd at localhost at Tue Jul 18 12:20:33 2006 ... localhost kernel: EIP is at ata_pio_task+0x592/0x677 [libata] Message from syslogd at localhost at Tue Jul 18 12:20:33 2006 ... localhost kernel: eax: 04eebb23 ebx: 00000004 ecx: f7d58f08 edx: f7c78310 Message from syslogd at localhost at Tue Jul 18 12:20:33 2006 ... localhost kernel: esi: 00000002 edi: 00000000 ebp: 00000282 esp: f7d58f18 Message from syslogd at localhost at Tue Jul 18 12:20:33 2006 ... localhost kernel: ds: 007b es: 007b ss: 0068 Message from syslogd at localhost at Tue Jul 18 12:20:33 2006 ... localhost kernel: Process ata/3 (pid: 382, threadinfo=f7d58000 task=f7ca3630) Message from syslogd at localhost at Tue Jul 18 12:20:33 2006 ... localhost kernel: Stack: <0>f7ca3758 c3500590 f7c78310 c3337160 faf71700 003e360e 00000000 00000003 Message from syslogd at localhost at Tue Jul 18 12:20:33 2006 ... localhost kernel: 00000282 f7de39c0 f7c788cc f7c788d0 f7de39c0 00000282 c01314b0 f8831334 Message from syslogd at localhost at Tue Jul 18 12:20:33 2006 ... localhost kernel: f7c78310 f7de39d8 f7de39c0 f7de39e0 c0131c9d c0131d83 00000000 00000000 Message from syslogd at localhost at Tue Jul 18 12:20:33 2006 ... localhost kernel: Call Trace: Message from syslogd at localhost at Tue Jul 18 12:20:33 2006 ... localhost kernel: [<c01314b0>] run_workqueue+0x7f/0xba [<f8831334>] ata_pio_task+0x0/0x677 [libata] Message from syslogd at localhost at Tue Jul 18 12:20:33 2006 ... localhost kernel: [<c0131c9d>] worker_thread+0x0/0x117 [<c0131d83>] worker_thread+0xe6/0x117 Message from syslogd at localhost at Tue Jul 18 12:20:33 2006 ... localhost kernel: [<c011da13>] default_wake_function+0x0/0xc [<c01345b1>] kthread+0x9d/0xc9 Message from syslogd at localhost at Tue Jul 18 12:20:33 2006 ... localhost kernel: [<c0134514>] kthread+0x0/0xc9 [<c0102005>] kernel_thread_helper+0x5/0xb Message from syslogd at localhost at Tue Jul 18 12:20:33 2006 ... localhost kernel: Code: 0f 0b 5f 0b 9f 56 83 f8 31 f6 31 db 8b 44 24 08 8b 50 04 ff 52 1c 84 c0 79 4d a1 00 dc 3b c0 8b 54 24 08 39 82 f0 05 00 00 79 16 <83> 8f 94 00 00 00 04 c7 82 ec 05 00 00 03 00 00 00 e9 63 fa ff