My Ubuntu box is locking up?

[James Bensley]

Hey List,

I have an Ubuntu 9.10 box on which I recently created a software
RAID6; you can see what it looks like in rather good detail if I may
say so my self ;) here: http://i48.tinypic.com/30jrbdl.jpg

After this set up was all done I shut the machine down for the night.

Now when I boot the machine up to start using the array it wants to
run the file system check utility, fsck I believe (like it normally
does, every N days or N mounts, "which ever comes first"). This is
fine, I assume it wants to do this because its a new volume and I like
to know everything is working fine so I would always let this run on
any of my machines but on this machine, it gets to the desk top, I can
see the process is running via top or the process monitor, but within
1 minute of being on the desk top the machine will locks up and is
unrecoverable so I am forced to turn it off? This happens every time,
so ever since a week ago when I first made this RAID array, I haven't
actually used the damn thing yet!

I can't understand why this would be; I thought it may have been the
power supply as it is only 250 watts but I have the machine connected
to a watt meter and I added the drives one at a time watching the
watts increase, we are only at 140 Watts? I had thought that maybe it
was to many devices on one single power cable coming out of the power
supply as I have had to use splitters on the power cables so I swapped
the power supply out temporarily for one in another machine that is
rated for 500 watts and had more power cables coming out of it but
no...I also stood another machine next to it, turn them on at the same
time and used the 2nd machines power connectors to power some of the
drives so the power was shared between the two PSUs, but no it still
locked up

Next I thought it was the south bridge being over run but surely it
wouldn't of been able to sit there for 20 hours building the RAID and
formatting it? Is it possible that the building of the RAID wasn't
very intense and now its all set up, when it tries to boot to the
desktop and run fsck this is now making the drives work hard and so
that only now the systems weakness is showing? (I did try increasing
the south bridge voltage but the options in the CMOS are very limited
and so I think there was a difference, it stayed on the desktop for 2
minutes before locking up instead of 1, but I can't remember, this
would need validating).

I would love to hear anyone's thoughts on how I can get this working again?

P.s. sorry for the length!

-- 
Regards,
James.

http://www.jamesbensley.co.cc/ - There are only 10 kinds of people in
the world, those who understand trinary, those who don't understand
trinary and those who don't understand trinary.