Comment 28 for bug 204996

I'm experiencing the same hard freeze with kernel 2.6.24-16. No wireless here, just onboard ethernet. The same system worked just fine under Gutsy, the problem's only started since upgrading to Hardy. My graphics card is an old S3 Virge. Crashes usually appear when watching Youtube in Firefox, but also have occured when watching videos from a locally attached USB drive. System appears stable under light load though - I stupidly uninstalled the Gutsy kernel not long after the upgrade, before I became aware of this problem, so I haven't been able to test the system with the old kernel. The computer is totally unresponsive, the pointer doesn't move etc, and appears offline from when scanned by other computers on the network.

The weirdest thing (to me at least) is that after the computer has been power cycled (the only way to get it to respond again) the BIOS sequence hangs. The hard drive light goes on and stays on, but the BIOS doesn't go on to detect the hard drives. The only way to get round this appears to be to hold down the power button for five seconds until the machine shuts down, then leave it for 10 minutes or so, and then turn it back on. After this it appears to behave normally, until the next freeze.

There's a post on the forums that appears to be describing the same problem: http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=725669
As suggested on there I tried booting with 'noapic nolapic irqpoll noirqdebug', but this didn't help. I don't have a great deal of time to troubleshoot, but would like to help in sorting this out if there's any other information I can provide.