[Techtalk] help!

[James]

My friend and I had a similar sounding problem with 2 sticks of RAM I
bought for us (2 512meg no name sticks).

Within 2 weeks of installing it, both of us had to reformat our
individual computers.  But we never had a problem after that.

- James

> -----Original Message-----
> From: techtalk-admin at linuxchix.org 
> [mailto:techtalk-admin at linuxchix.org] On Behalf Of Jeff Dike
> Sent: Friday, January 25, 2002 9:16 PM
> To: Katie
> Cc: techtalk at linuxchix.org
> Subject: Re: [Techtalk] help! 
> 
> 
> katie at katie-and-rob.org said:
> > What do I do from here?
> 
> The first thing to do is to find the bad memory and remove 
> it.  Or maybe the overheating CPU.  Those would be my first 
> two guesses.
> 
> Another possibility is a bad disk or bad sectors on it - 
> those should fill the kernel log with device, block layer, 
> and filesystem errors.
> 
> I had something very similar happen a few weeks ago.  I put a 
> new stick of memory in my laptop, and happily ran with it for 
> a couple of weeks, then one morning I got massive file 
> corruption.  The memory was the last thing I thought of.  I 
> exonerated the disk and filesystem first.  By then, the bad 
> memory had polluted a whole pile of data by corrupting the 
> page cache and writing it back out to disk.
> 
> I've RH installed on it, so after I pulled the bad memory, I spent an 
> afternoon running rpm -V and rpm -i to figure out which RPMs 
> had corrupted files and replace them.
> 
> There were some unexpected after-effects.  The next morning, 
> it didn't boot at all (the kernel didn't even load).  It 
> turned out that the kernel RPM had failed verification 
> (probably because I had replaced the 2.4.2 kernel it came 
> with with 2.4.17) and removed the new kernel.
> 
> I had also replaced the kernel headers with the 2.4.17 
> headers.  These also got "fixed", giving me back the wrong 
> TUN/TAP ioctl numbers I wanted rid of.
> 
> 				Jeff
> 
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