esean

it appears to have been the network card after all (for me). booted into linux with m/b network card enabled and 10/100 plugged into pci, and told mdk not to activate the m/b card at boot and removed the driver from /etc/modules.conf. then rebooted and set BIOS to disable the card m/b network card. i think that was all i did, there were several reboots in there... but no more locks with heavy network traffic! -sean

hello, i also have the ga-7n400 pro 2 and am seeing hard locks. i have had it lock with mandrake 9.0, 9.2, win2k and during the gentoo 1.0 install. i am suspecting the gigabit on-board lan because it seems to happen when transferring lots of data from another computer and talking to that computer via ssh, etc. i hung gentoo right at the start with their script "net-setup eth0" => dead. i installed a PCI 10/100 network card and disabled the on-board lan, but the OSes still appear to be talking to the on-board lan or something to see what it is. i'm interested to hear what you found. i'm going to try the <CTRL>-F1 trick to get into the "secret" BIOS settings and see what i find. thanks, -sean