On Tuesday 01 Jul 2008 22:56, Rony wrote: > Arun Khan wrote: > > On Tuesday 01 Jul 2008, jtd wrote: > >> In the distant past, in many cases where installations were > >> bombing, running memory check showed up bad ram. > > > > Hmm. how do you do this if the system fails to boot some sort of > > live cd (with mem test tools)? > > In my 4+ years old system which is the most most GNU/Linux > friendly, mem test would hang in the second round itself. However > it has installed XP and most Linux distros in it. (Touch Wood)
If memtest says it's bad, it is definetly bad. It just happens that you are not using this part of mem. Drams are complex beasts with charge pumps and internal delay lines. Hence certain combos of data and address bits at full speed fail. This is one reason for random crashes. BTW linux had a badram patch which could use known defective memories. -- Rgds JTD -- http://mm.glug-bom.org/mailman/listinfo/linuxers
