Not that I have much to add, but I can confirm how sensitive Prime95 can be. I had overclocked a previous system and was pleased that all of my business and entertainment software appeared to function normally, but then Prime95 would give *some* error and quit calculating *some* stage. Clocking back to the proper frequency satisfied Prime95, so I left things alone, assuming that if Prime95 detected problems, then worse could be the *undetected* problems with my data down the road. I would suggest Prime95 to any overclockers, regardless of their desire to discover new primes.
Erle http://GANNS.com Games, Science, Technology, Humor Tell your friends about GANNS.com or I will cut you in the face. > -----Original Message----- > From: [EMAIL PROTECTED] > [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] On Behalf Of Jeremy Blosser > Sent: Tuesday, March 22, 2005 1:16 PM > To: 'The Great Internet Mersenne Prime Search list'; 'Tom Duda' > Subject: RE: [Prime] Unexpected and baffling problem > > Since Prime95 is a processor intensive task, it can easily > make system errors show up due to overheating. Prime95 is > used a lot by overclockers to test their systems when they > increase the chip speed. I'd hazard a guess that the errors > you guys saw were due to Prime95 taxing your system so much > that somewhere along the way the disk drivers wrote some bad > data out to the HD. > > What is odd is that most antivirus programs will catch if a > program tries to write to the boot sector, so if you had one > running at the time you were running Prime95, I'd be fairly > certain that the cause is faulty hardware that is showing up > when Prime95 runs just because Prime95 is taxing your system > to the point that the hardware errors show up. > > I'd be interested to see if you run some other CPU crunching > program and see if the same behavior manifests itself. > > Jeremy Blosser > > -----Original Message----- > From: Alberto Manuel Bertoli E. [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] > Sent: Tuesday, March 22, 2005 1:57 PM > To: Tom Duda; The Great Internet Mersenne Prime Search list > Subject: Re: [Prime] Unexpected and baffling problem > > -----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE----- > Hash: SHA1 > > Tom Duda wrote: > > > Hello > > > > Last Thursday, primality testing (L-L) began on my machine. > As I had > > been > told, this phase is the most RAM-intensive part of the > operations of Prime95. What I did not expect was that the > boot sector of my system partition became corrupted. I first > permitted Prime95 to remain installed; I booted to the > Recovery Console (installed on my machine as a boot-time > option) and typed FIXBOOT. The system partition was repaired. > The next time I attempted to boot to the desktop, I again > encountered a problem with the boot sector. I uninstalled > Prime95 and executed FIXBOOT. Since then, there has not been > a problem. > > > > You will say ?It is impossible for Prime95 to do anything with the > > boot > sector.? I will agree with you. All I know is what I saw. And > no, there are no viruses, worms, trojans, etc. on my machine. > I ran my antivirus software and all three of my > anti-spyware/trojan utilities. I keep my definitions up to > date and run those tools quite often. > > > > Something corrupted my boot sector. By coincidence, the corruption > happened on the same day that Prime95 began primality > testing. By similar coincidence, the corruption stopped when > Prime95 was uninstalled. hmmmmm. > > > > Tom Duda > > > hello, > > last weekend it happened something like that, i run WinXP pro > SP2 on PIII-500mhz 196RAM and almost 24h/day runnig prime239, > saturday i've downloaded the prime246 and all went ok, sunday > i was playing diabloII and my pc rebooted but when in the > grub menu (fedora C1) could not load anymore my win > partition... it was deleted, what could be the reason? no > viruses, i use avg and was up-to-date, well the bad point is > that all the work is lost... > > alberto bertoli > > -----BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE----- > Version: GnuPG v1.2.4 (MingW32) > Comment: Using GnuPG with Netscape - http://enigmail.mozdev.org > > iD8DBQFCQHh9FtJp6tIiMqcRAnVrAKCeYPCBZCBq2Z7qE4nZPmoSeENBqgCdGWq2 > wjxpX4h32zV+y0jpaxWPYpo= > =kqcu > -----END PGP SIGNATURE----- > _______________________________________________ > Prime mailing list > [email protected] > http://hogranch.com/mailman/listinfo/prime > > > _______________________________________________ > Prime mailing list > [email protected] > http://hogranch.com/mailman/listinfo/prime > _______________________________________________ Prime mailing list [email protected] http://hogranch.com/mailman/listinfo/prime
