On Fri, Mar 17, 2006 at 03:41:28PM +0000, Steve Blinkhorn wrote:
> I also had a series of attempted boots where the device probe
> sequence stopped with a long backtrace with references either to
> a "hardclock" or what looked like  shorthand for the real-time
> clock.

I'd check for bad memory first - try memtest86.org

Martin