Hardware diagnostic tools? Interrupts?

[Frederick N. Brier]

I just upgraded my Fedora 16 development workstation from an AMD Phenom 
II to an Intel i7 2600K on an Asus P8Z68-M Pro along with a Kingston 
SSD. Unfortunately, I ran into a bit of a snag.  It hangs in the boot 
process with the last line being:

ahci 0000: 06:00.0: PCI INT A -> GSI 18 (level, low) -> IRQ 18

I used Phoronix to run some benchmarks on my system prior to the 
install, but am wondering if there are some other tools that can help 
diagnose hardware problems.  Please post any suggestions.  I ran memtest 
for 4+ hours and the 16GB was perfect.  Oh, and I am not over clocking 
anything.  The only other card in the system is an eVGA 7950GS.

My original boot drive was a 3Ware PCI 8xxx RAID controller with two 1TB 
Samsung drives mirrored and using LVM.  The halt happens with this 
system and with the Fedora 16 install DVD.  It did not happen with a 
Linux Mint 12 install DVD or a Lubuntu install CD or earlier Fedora 
releases (I think I tried an 8 or an 11).   They would all boot their 
live images fine.

I had researched this motherboard before buying it and saw that it had 
been used successfully by both Fedora and other Linux users. At the end 
of this email, I will relate all the avenues thus far explored, but 
believe at this point I may be dealing with an interrupt timing problem 
with a 3Ware PCI 8xxx RAID controller.  So yesterday, I decided to give 
the Lubuntu a try.  The RAID mirror was my main drive, but the SSD is 
now my boot drive with the LVM volumes now having their mount points on 
the SSD.  All seemed well so I thought perhaps it was a Fedora bug based 
on some posts I read, however all of a sudden, the LVM partitions 
started getting I/O errors. /proc/mounts would show the partitions 
mounted rw, but as soon as there was an error, it would change to ro. At 
that point, any read to the 3Ware partitions would generate an error and 
update the /proc/mounts to ro.  I could copy upwards of 20GB of data 
with no problem, but then boom.

This is my first motherboard with UEFI. Initially, I tried disabling 
features to get it the F16 install DVD to boot. At one point, 
configuring the SATA drives to use IDE instead of AHIC, it got to the 
point of display a white background with a cursor, but was hung at that 
point. I also noted that the Scroll and Num lock keys would cause the 
keyboard LEDs to blink once, but did not stay on. Very strange.

Once a upon a time, there was a Fedora release where I had to insert a 
delay in the boot parameters because the 3Ware controllers (9550SX and 
9650SE) were taking too long to initialize. Are there parameters to 
tweak the 3w-xxxx driver?  Or am I dealing with a defective Asus 
motherboard? Most of the time, a feature in a defective motherboard will 
just not work, like a keyboard/mouse controller, Ethernet port, slot, or 
video. Memory can be flaky, but motherboards not so much.  Thoughts?  
Thank you for any help or suggestions.

Fred

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