Re: [vox-tech] When RAM goes bad...

["Mark K. Kim" <lugod@cbreMAPSak.org>]

We once had a mother board with bad RAM bank at an installfest.  The
computer had two RAM sticks and Linux wouldn't install so we tried
removing the second bank's RAM, and everything installed fine.  So we
initially thought it was bad RAM, but we tried swapping the two RAM sticks
and the computer still worked fine.  So we deduced that it was probably
the bank with bad connection or something like that.  We recommended to
the installee that if they wanted to upgrade the RAM then they should just
get one large RAM stick instead of trying to add more (not that there was
any more banks to add RAMs to.)

-Mark


On Sun, 6 Mar 2005, Peter Jay Salzman wrote:

> I suspect one of my machines has bad RAM.
>
> Out of the blue, Unreal Tournament occaisionally segfaults.
>
> Then Nero is no longer capable of verifying burned DVDs in Windows.  When I
> boot into Linux, the burned files on DVD and resident files on the hard
> drive have the same md5sum, so Nero's verification is faulty.  The burn
> looks good.  Verification is ill.
>
> Played some Quake3 while KDE libs were downloading, and it just segfaulted.
> It never did that before.  In fact, none of these things ever happened
> before.
>
> Everything on both OS's points to bad RAM.  The RAM is only 2 or 3 years
> old.  Is it unheard of for RAM to die that quickly?
>
> I've never run memtest86 before, but I got it running right now.  Aptitude
> got it, made a boot floppy and it's running.  Looks like it may take awhile.
>
> I've never come across this piece of bad luck before.  Any other tools to
> look at?  I only knew of memtest86 from this mailing list.
>
> Any other words of wisdom?  Except for the odd hard drive, all my machines
> outlived their usefulness rather than components dying before their time.
> This is a new one on me.
>
> At this point, I'm *hoping* memtest86 tell me to replace a DIMM because
> otherwise, I'm at a complete loss.
>
> Pete
>
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Mark K. Kim
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