[Cialug] Dying commputer question

[Matthew Nuzum]

On Tue, Apr 8, 2008 at 11:18 AM,  <murraymckee at wellsfargo.com> wrote:
> I have a new CPU and I believe the ram is new to, but I don't remember
>  off the top of my head.  I'll try the memtest86 when I get home tonight.
>
>  I started memtest86 last night and ran it for about 25 minutes through
>  one complete cycle, and no errors were reported.  I'm assuming that even
>  though the test restarted, any error found would not be erased from the
>  screen.  I meant to leave it running overnight, but forgot to restart it
>  after I got done exploring Ubuntu.  BTW, the ram is new with the mother
>  board and CPU.

I've had this problem too. I've seen a couple causes - one, you've
already covered, is defective hardware. A second, but rare option is
cpu or other component overheating but I don't think it's your problem
here. The third, and probably most common cause is that new
motherboards detect the hard drive with slightly different parameters.

In the bad old days you'd get nothing. Dos/Win95/98 would start to
boot but then stop. Fdisk would say that there was no partitions or
they were corrupted. Sometimes it would work but you'd get VXD errors.
Windows now will kind of work. However you will get problems.
Sometimes you will have serious data corruption that will only be
evidenced when you try to open a large file and the computer will hard
freeze. I don't know if this has happened in your case.

>  I was surprised to hear the existing hard drive being accessed while
>  Ubuntu booted off the CD.  Should I be worried about what it being read
>  or written to my C: drive?

It won't write to your drive but it will access it in order to show an
icon on your desktop. It's trying to detect your partitions.

You can do this:
    sudo fdisk -l
(thatls a little L) to show a list of partitions on your drive

>  I created a new open office word document.  I was again quite surprised
>  to hear lots of C: drive accesses while the word processing software
>  opened.  But I couldn't save anything on my C: drive or see any
>  documents already on my C: drive.  Again, should I be worried about what
>  is being read or written to my C: drive?

I don't know for sure, but I'll bet the system set up a mount point
and some applications are scanning them to make them available to you.

>  I looked for SpinRite on the way home but couldn't find it for sale.  I
>  discovered this morning that it can only be down loaded and I don't have
>  a working windows machine to create the bootable version on.  Yeah, in
>  hind sight I should have done that before my machine crashed.  (My
>  machine here at work is locked down so I can't load any software on it.)

I don't know if it will work or not. Ask your friendly IT staff if
they have a computer that you can use for this. Maybe they even have
another tool you can use, though SpinRite is among the best.

UBCD has some useful utilities http://www.ultimatebootcd.com/ - I've
used it in a pinch before. Its a free collection of utilities that you
can burn to a bootable CD. If you have a spare hard drive you might
consider using a cloning tool to clone your drive over.

-- 
Matthew Nuzum
newz2000 on freenode