[Cialug] Crashing with errors in mcelog

[Daniel A. Ramaley]

On 2009-03-03 at 13:25:56, Aaron Porter wrote:
><daniel.ramaley at drake.edu> wrote:
>> The thing about memtest86, though, is that in my experience it just
>> flat out doesn't work. I've let it run for days on machines that are
>> known to have memory problems and it never finds them.
>
>When running memtest on "server grade" hardware it's important to
>disable ECC in the system BIOS. I've had vendors swear up and down
>that there are no memory issues as they were testing the error
>correction and not the memory itself.

Thanks for the hint.

In the past i've only run memtest86 on cheap desktop hardware without 
ECC.

My desktop machine at home is "server grade" hardware, to the limit of 
what budget i was able to rationalize at the time. It does have ECC 
RAM. I'll be sure to disable the ECC when running memtest86. My 
previous machine was also "server grade" hardware and ended up being my 
primary machine for 9 years with very little upgrades--the only major 
one was replacing the SCSI subsystem (controller, CD-RW drive, hard 
drive) with SATA. I was hoping that if i used high quality hardware 
that i could have another machine that would last a long time.

------------------------------------------------------------------------
Dan Ramaley                            Dial Center 118, Drake University
Network Programmer/Analyst             2407 Carpenter Ave
+1 515 271-4540                        Des Moines IA 50311 USA