Freeze + flashing LEDs on K7TV2 m/b with AMD XP2400+

[mercurial]

Hi
I recently installed an ASRock K7TV2 motherboard with an AMD Athlon XP2400+ CPU and AMD certified spleeze cooler/heatsink. To overcome the AMD heating problem, I have installed an exhaust fan and a chassis fan that sucks air in from the front and blows it toward the exhaust. I am also using a 400W dual fan PSU. The RAM is two 256KB PC100 chips which I have had for quite a while without any problems. Graphics card and NIC, floppy drive, CD-RW are all from my previous build and never gave me problems. I am running 1 CD-RW, a floppy, and a 40GB HDD - nothing too heavy. I am using Linux Mandrake 9.1.
The problem doesn't seem to follow any particular pattern, with the possible exception of accessing my CD-RW (only because I've noticed it then): the system freezes (mouse cursor, keyboard locks, etc) and the Caps lock and Scroll lock LEDs flash simultaneously. It requires power down at the box, unplugging the power cable and reconnecting and rebooting. I left the box running last night without any problems and it was still running fine this a.m. (some 8 hours later), and I have the motherboard side panel off the box just in case it still might be heat.
The CPU temp is about 45 deg C, and M/B is at about 31 or 32. The side of the CPU fan does feel hot but the underside of the board (on the chassis side panel) does not. I don't know if this is normal or not. AFAIK, the CPU fan is correctly installed, but I admit I am loathe to remove it to double check just in case I damage it in someway.
So ... any ideas?

[saxon]

What you've got there is a Kernel Panic.

May I ask how much Ram your video card has ?!

Since there is a glitch with the Kernel 2.6 from mandrake 9.1 within the framebuffer routine, that cannot handle videocards with more than 32MB ram properly.

There is a workaround, that you set the videomode to vga=0 and limit the memory entry to 512MB in lilo.conf during installation.

After complete install you can reset to the correct values, otherwise you'll get these kernel panics all the time after installation