Home PC has been doing a couple of Odd Things lately. Nothing specific or reproducbile, just Odd Things. Well, there was the occasional ‘CRC check’ errors at boot up, which Shouldn’t Ever Happen. A classic sign of a RAM problem.
A quick run of memtest86+ shows a single, broken bit at the 570MB mark. Hmmm. Well, I’ll need to order some replacement RAM I guess (I have a single 1GB stick in there), but in the meantime I have set the “mem=nnnM” option on the boot loader so that the system only uses the first 550MB of system RAM, which is “known good”. Runs fine. I just hope that’s enough for me to still run Enemy Territory with the LUG Radio crew tomorrow.
Could you not use BadRAM? http://rick.vanrein.org/linux/badram/
PermalinkYes, I considered this (and would probably have tried it had the bad spot been nearer the ‘lower’ end of the RAM).
The other reason for not doing this is that in my experience, RAM which starts going bad typically continues getting worse; so I’d much rather get a new module than faff about continually re-priming BadRAM’s “known bad parts of RAM” config … 🙂
Permalink570MB should be plenty for ET – 128MB is the recommended minimum.
Sadly I will miss the game tomorrow night 🙁
Permalink> Sadly I will miss the game
> tomorrow night
Nooooooooooooooooooooo!
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