On Thu, 07 Feb 2008 02:38:01 +0000, The Natural Philosopher wrote:

Dave Plowman (News) wrote:
In article ,
Rob wrote:
Just disable suspect software, and/or try to replicate the fault in
safe mode (F7 on boot IIRC).

Happens in safe mode too. Should have mentioned that.

PCs are basically a few components - you have to work through and
isolate. My guess from what you say would be MB on a new PC - the
trickiest component to test alas.

I've fairly extensive experience of electronic faults but this one
doesn't follow the norm.

My Mac has been doing the same. POS.

Anyway, yesterday it screwed the whole system disk to the point it
couldn't even verify t.

New disk went in, but ..oh dear..better, but still not fixed.

I am ****ing around pulling out one ram chip after another to see if one
removal makes it happy.

So far..the smallest one is out..and it hasn't crashed..

Look, everything goes on the bus in a computer. CPU, peripherals, RAM
chips- the lot. One of those doing silly buggers can cause random memory
corruption. Sometimes one thing you plug in works fine. And another, but
two together..no way.

Then it escalates from there. You gate a couple of bytes corrupted.No
big deal. Then maybe that bit gets swapped out, or swapped into another
bit of Ram. so thats two bits of corruption..and on it goes, and
eventually the OS itself tries to access some memory it shouldn't, and
it's showtime. Or you send an impossible command to the disk controller,
and the disk ****s up. A call to memory location zero, will reboot the
machine. Or is it 0000FFFF? I forget.


All you can do is remove as much as possible and try for stability, and
then put a piece back at a time..

Anyway, sorry for rambling on. I am waiting for this ******* machine to
crash. So far it hasn't. Oh, could it be the 64Mbyte chip? I only put it
in because it was the last spare chip and there was a slot available...

You can also try booting a standalone OS such as Unbuntu or RedHat, and
see if the system holds up. Since the standalone systems are very memory
intensive it could show up the problem.

--
Ed Sirett - Property maintainer and registered gas fitter.
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