[Cialug] Crashing with errors in mcelog

[Matthew Nuzum]

On Tue, Mar 3, 2009 at 8:36 AM, Daniel A. Ramaley
<daniel.ramaley at drake.edu> wrote:
> On 2009-03-02 at 22:00:35, kristau wrote:
>>Have you tried running memtest86?  The latest System Rescue CD,
>>Knoppix, Ubuntu or most other live CDs have it as a boot option.
>>That's what I'd try next if I found myself in your situation.
>
> I've not tried any testing applications yet. I was actually thinking
> this morning (after the machine crashed twice again--the crashes always
> come in pairs, which seems odd) about either seeing if SuperMicro has a
> diagnostic for the motherboard, or running a memory test. I'll explore
> both of those options.
>
> The thing about memtest86, though, is that in my experience it just flat
> out doesn't work. I've let it run for days on machines that are known
> to have memory problems and it never finds them. And i've done this
> more than once. Never have i had it report errors, even on machines
> with known-bad RAM.

I've had it report errors for me. I find it quite useful but I always
forget to run it until I'm at the point of serious frustration on the
matter.

Regarding crashes coming in pairs, is it possible the reason for the
second crash is a warm-boot vs. cold-boot problem? For example, I've
seen in several instances where a computer will not properly reset
itself on warm-boot (reboot command or ctrl+alt+del or etc) and crash
very shortly after boot. However if you hit the power button and give
the computer 30s of rest then it works.

This doesn't help your problem with the first crash of course.

-- 
Matthew Nuzum
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