Gentoo triggered system crashes on my Athlon T-bird box!!

[butters]

I built this machine from the following components less than a year ago:

Epox 8K7A+
1.4 GHz AMD Athlon Thunderbird 266 FSB
512 MB Crucial PC2100 DDR ECC Registered SDRAM
300W Antec PSU
Asus V7100 2V1D (GeForce2 MX w/ TwinView)
The rest shouldn't matter.

I'd been running Win2k on it for some time, switched over to Slack, loved it . . . then hated it, and decided to switch to Gentoo. The machine had always been stable (for a Windows box, that is).

I got Gentoo up and running with Fluxbox and started installing apps one by one, when the machine hard restarted while testing out Mozilla's mail client. Since then, the machine became unstable and would restart randomly when doing "complicated" things. When the machine rebooted, I had lost the kernel module loader, and recompiling a new kernel did not fix the problem. Switching back to an old kernel that had always worked (with no sound) also had the same problem. Hard restarts and no modules. There is a lot to this, so read my previous threads here and here if you are interested.

I thought something in my install (hence, in software) had broken, so I decided to reinstall from scratch, use the vanilla kernel tree, and see if things would resolve themselves. Well, I started the bootstrap script and returned later to find the ISOLINUX boot prompt again. The machine had restarted in the middle.

Does this sound like a hardware problem? I have never had this problem with any other OS. I might just throw Win2k back on it to see if I have hard restarts on that too. Anyone have any idea what piece of hardware could be causing this?
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If tugboats were bigger, they'd be the ones getting tugged.

[pjp]

Are you overclocking? If not, it could be bad RAM. I think I read somewhere
in the forums that linux is more picky about RAM. That could explain why it worked
with Windows OK.
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Quis separabit? Quo animo?

[3x9]

Butters - I know the feeling, getting blind-sided like it is is a deliberate stab-in-the back
from a former valued friend - the traitor !

Don't see any sure cures posted, or if the problem still exists, but I am reasonably certain
when compiling the kernel, there is several references about not enabling SMP support
when using Nvidia drivers, if you do not have more than one CPU.
Possibly a Forum search would shed more light on this ?
Other than that, something must be different with your newest compile ?
You mentioned, previous versions were good ?
Did you already check out possible over-heat or power glitches ?
As it does not take much time to do a temporary Window install, it might be useful
as a way to confirm if h/ware or software is the culprit ?
Aside from the above, only other personal insight I can share is - I never won a swearing match w/my monitor yet !
One sure-fire cure (at least - for Windows), why spend countless hours trouble-shooting,
if a re-install fixes everything, or gets rid of most probable causes in software.