[Techtalk] ECC Lesson

[Julie]

Liz Young wrote:
> 
> On Saturday 20 July 2002 02:30 pm, Julie wrote:
> > Well, I don't think either of us told you the most fun thing
> > in the world about ECC memory -- with a lot of it you must
> > write every single last bite of memory with some value before
> > trying to use it or you are in big poopy trouble ...
> 
> Interesting!  Can you expand on that?  How much is a lot of it?  How
> does one write every single last bit?  Define big poopy trouble. :-)

Sure!  When the ECC memory is powered on it contains random crud
which almost certainly isn't "correct", ECC-wise.  If you were
to fetch from that memory it would prolly fail much the same way
that it would if you had bad memory.

> I put a gig (that is a lot to me) of ECC RAM in my server and ran
> Memtest on it overnight to make sure there were no errors before
> installing the OS. I guess that achieved the "write every single last
> byte" part (?)  Unconsciously, my geek intuition told me to do it.

Most likely all of the memory was written during POST.  I have
a gig in this box and I assume all of it is tested then.  It had
better be ...
-- 
Julianne Frances Haugh             Life is either a daring adventure
jockgrrl at austin.rr.com                 or nothing at all.
					    -- Helen Keller