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Thread: Hardware problem

  1. #1
    Network|Geek kidzer's Avatar
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    Hardware problem

    Good afternoon folks, i'm posting this from a fresh install of Ubuntu 5.10, because the machine is rather decked it seems.

    The story so far, came home yesterday to find PC in a BSOD state, I rebooted and got an error saying something along the lines of 'cannot load windows - press Ctrl + Alt + Delete to reboot' (sorry for how vague description - i've been workin on this machine non stop since then basically and seen a hell of a lot of errors.

    Ok I thought, I've nothing valuable installed - i'll just reformat and be done with it, which I did - and it worked, until I rebooted to install something - and got the same error!

    I had PowerMax on a floppy, so I ran it overnight and checked in the morning and it said "this HD is failing" - so I put in a spare 5400 RPM drive I had to get a temporary install on it, but it was suddenly failing aswell, odd, given that I took it out of its previous machine in perfect health and its been in an antistatic bag ever since.

    I managed to install linux now, on the first HD I mentioned, which is odd - because I couldn't earlier.

    Does this seem like a HD problem, IDE cable problem (only thing I haven't got here to swap out, although I swapped the one from CD -> Mobo onto HD -> Mobo and got the same error), or potentially a Motherboard problem?

    Any help mucho appreciated!

    Cheers,
    David
    "If you're not on the edge, you're taking up too much room!"
    - me, 2005

  2. #2
    Network|Geek kidzer's Avatar
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    • kidzer's system
      • Motherboard:
      • $motherboard
      • CPU:
      • Intel Q6600
      • Memory:
      • 4GB
      • Storage:
      • 1TiB Samsung
      • Graphics card(s):
      • BFG 8800GTS OC
      • PSU:
      • Antec Truepower
      • Case:
      • Antec P160
      • Operating System:
      • Windows 7
      • Monitor(s):
      • 20" Viewsonic
      • Internet:
      • ~3Mbps ADSL (TalkTalk Business)
    Update: I remembered during my failed Ubuntu installation attempts a reference to an error creating a RAMdisk, so I ran Memtest and it threw up errors around the 800MiB mark, I removed my 3rd stick of RAM (I run 512MiB,256MiB,256MiB) and Ubuntu installed - i've just formatted the drive and installed Windows sucessfully - can this be put down to faulty RAM, given all that has happened?
    "If you're not on the edge, you're taking up too much room!"
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  3. #3
    Amateur photographer Hans Voralberg's Avatar
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    I think so, BSOD is most of the time RAM related. But Im not saying it for sure though
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  4. #4
    Network|Geek kidzer's Avatar
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    • kidzer's system
      • Motherboard:
      • $motherboard
      • CPU:
      • Intel Q6600
      • Memory:
      • 4GB
      • Storage:
      • 1TiB Samsung
      • Graphics card(s):
      • BFG 8800GTS OC
      • PSU:
      • Antec Truepower
      • Case:
      • Antec P160
      • Operating System:
      • Windows 7
      • Monitor(s):
      • 20" Viewsonic
      • Internet:
      • ~3Mbps ADSL (TalkTalk Business)
    Yep, its this 2nd stick of GEIL RAM I got given by a mate from Uni, first one works fine - I just tried the second one in my 3rd slot again and got the same 'Ctrl + Alt + Delete' error - put in a 256MiB stick I had and it worked fine - so now i've got 1GiB of working RAM

    Edit: having said that, i got the error when I had 1280MiB of RAM installed, could it be the odd volume of RAM thats making it go funny - 512+256+512?

    I'll try with 512 + 512 tomorrow and report back
    Last edited by kidzer; 19-11-2006 at 01:14 AM.
    "If you're not on the edge, you're taking up too much room!"
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