On Sun, May 16, 2004 at 09:33:31PM +0200, David Suna wrote: > I have a Redhat 9 system. I installed the system on a 128 MB Pentium III > and the system was very slow. I then installed an additional 128 MB of > memory and the system behaved much more responsively. The problem I have > now is that the system has become unstable. Periodically, it seems when > the system is under heavy memory load, the system will just reboot. > > I suspect that the problem is with the memory since sometimes after a > crash the system will report only 128 MB of RAM available. I have tried
That's definitely a clue. > reseating the memory into another slot but that has not solved the > problem. Is there any log file or some other debugging aid that would > tell me if the memory is really the problem? Is it possible that this is I personally use memtest86. Recently there is a fork that works on newer boards/chipsets, called memtestplus. Google for memtest86. In some cases I got NMIs with "unknown reason 2c" that were solved by replacing memory or board. Linux logged this (which eventually arrived at /var/log/messages), but did not reboot. After a reboot I also got messages from the BIOS. > because there is a mismatch between the two memory banks? The first 128 > MB came with the machine when I bought it a few years ago and I don't know > if it is PC-100 or PC-133. The new 128 MB is definitely PC-133. The > person I bought the memory from said that it shouldn't matter since the > faster memory would just run slower but he is not at all Linux literate. I think he is right. I tried such things. I did not read official docs. > > I want to ask for the memory to be exchanged but I want to have all the > facts before I do that. Simply run memtest (I think either version will do) for as long as you can (at least a few hours, better a few days), or until you get errors. If you do, insist on a replacement. If you have another board to test on, try it. It might be a problem in the board. You can also exchange the two DIMMs and see if the errors stay in the same places (which means board problems) or move to the other half of memory address range (which means bad memory). If you do get errors, it would be interesting if you can tell us how long it took to get them. I had cases that took less than a minute, but also cases that took a few hours until first error. > > Thanks, Good luck, -- Didi ================================================================= To unsubscribe, send mail to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with the word "unsubscribe" in the message body, e.g., run the command echo unsubscribe | mail [EMAIL PROTECTED]
