[Techtalk] Trouble with upgrading RAM

[Tracey Clark]

Riccarda,

One of the standard rules of troubleshooting is - if something doesn't
work now, and worked before, whatever changed between the time it worked
and not worked is a likely suspect. In your case, since you are
experiencing no problems with only one RAM stick, and consisent problems
with both RAM sticks inserted, your cause is most likely the RAM. Just
adding one stick of RAM is not enough of a power draw to make your power
supply a likely cause.

RAM chips that look identical can still have some major things different
about them. An important one is ECC - Error checking. If one is ECC
memory and the other is not, that will cause problems. Also if they are
different clock speeds, that would definitely cause problems, but
probably make the sytem unable to boot at all. Check the manufacturer
model numbers on the stickers on the RAM. Look those up on the
Fujitsu-Siemens website, and make sure these specs are the same. That's a
good starting point.

And it was said by Riccarda Cassini-->

> I ran memtest86 for a couple of hours, and it didn't report any errors.
>>From this I conclude that the module does at least not have a
>> permanent
> defect.

That was a good idea :)

> Someone at work suggested it might be the power supply.

What is their reasoning?

> [*] BTW, any recommendations on which filesystem to use?

I've had good experiences with xfs. It's recovery time after crashes is
nearly nill. It used to have stability problems, but those are generally
rumored to be cleared out. A presenter at my local Linux group brought in
a 5 blade server running xfs doing streaming video, shut it down while it
was streaming, brought it back up, and the boot process took maybe a
whole second longer. Since he worked for Industrial Light & Magic
(Lucasfilms) they were very worried about reliability and stability of
their servers. They had only good experiences with xfs.

(Standard disclaimer: I don't knock any filesystem, to each their own)

-- 
Tracey
Linux Counter #264789

"Really, I'm not out to destroy Microsoft. That will just be a completely
unintentional side effect." - Linus Torvalds, New York Times, 28 Sept 03