Error mesg on boot, 1.2.13 kernel

[Mike Bilow]

Paul E. Ratty wrote in a message to Mike Bilow:

 PER> My question is : What is the reference to unexpected_intr:0x40. 

The machine architecture is such that spurious interrupts are passed to the
last channel in the interrupt controller, meaning that spurious interrupts
received on IRQ0-7 show up as IRQ7 and those received on IRQ8-15 show up as
IRQ15.  Since IRQ15 is mapped by default to the second physical IDE channel of
an IDE controller (which has IDE0 and IDE1), its driver gets the spurious
interrupts.

 PER> I am using OnTrac's disk manager. 

The OnTrack software is probably unrelated.

 PER> I do have some bad sectors on the primary drive, could linux
 PER> be getting  hung up on these blocks.

Bad disk sectors would likely show up differently.  However, it is possible
that the bad disk sectors contain part of the Linux boot code or data, and this
could obviously cause almost any abnormal or erratic behavior.

 PER> If so how do I get around this?

You fix the hardware.  You probably have a card that is generating funny IRQ
pulls for no particular reason.  Anything that usually might generate an IRQ is
suspect, including serial and parallel ports, network cards, sound cards, the
motherboard, and -- most likely -- the EIDE controller.
 
-- Mike