[Emergency Room] My computer is dead

[Mascarpone]

Hello,

I'm now facing the single biggest technical difficulty since I bought my first IBM machine in 1995. I'm a student low on budget, and my productive pc totally stopped working. I need your help guys, because I've never been good at HW problems, my solution has always been to format 😀

I bought this computer past christmas (2008), so it is just 13 months old, assembled at home by myself. At first I had a problem with the CPU heatsink, because it wasn't screwed correctly, at the cpu has been running too hot for a few days before it was fixed. It has worked fine till this summer when the os (ubuntu 8.04) started to be a bit buggy and sluggish, but this september my university borrowed me a powerful notebook, so I stopped using it till this christmas. The first of this month I booted it again, but it was too buggy so I formatted the disk. When I reinstalled the latest ubuntu the process refused to finish (error while writing to disk). The motherboard refuse to boot from USB, even though it looks like it supports it. Memory test, from the ubuntu installation disk, report some memory errors. The only thing that work fine is POST.

The main purpose of this computer was to handle the computational-expensive calculation, and a little bit of torrent. I'm not saying this because I'm shy of my taste for p2p, but because I want to underline that the usage has never been memory or disk-bound, but always computational-bound, plus a little bit of coding and internet broswing.

I obviously tried different cds to install ubuntu, and swapped the two hard disks that I own. I don't know what to do, and I won't buy any new hardware untill I'm sure it will fix my problem. Maybe my problem is that the PSU is too big (this computer is thought to handle nvidia tesla card for GPGPU purpose), or that maybe I might have damaged the mainboard while screwing uncorrectly the heatsink, or maybe is the very old cd rom.

My Hw config is:


CPU: Core 2 Quad Q6600 2,4 GHz Socket 775

Mainboard: (asus?) P5N-T DELUXE S775 NV780 SLI ATX SND+GLN+1394+U2 FSB1333 SATA2R

Ram: 4 GB (4x1 Gb) Dominator PC2-8500 1066MHZ CAS5 EPP 5-5-5

Psu: Decathlon 750W

Graphic card: Point Of View GeForce 8400GS PCI-E 512MB

Cd rom: Very old Pata device.

 

[mpilchfamily]

If RAM shows errors then it needs to be replaced.

The PSU can't be too big. It only outputs as much power as the system needs. Basicly the system has to pull the power from the PSU. It doens't just dump the power onto the system.

 

[summit]

probably ram

 

[NoQuarter]

http://www.memtest86.org

1 pass should let you know, takes half an hour I'd guess.

 

[oynaz]

You have a buggy system, and the mem checker reports errors? I will leave it up to you to put two and two together ;-)

 

[Magusigne]

Definately RAM related.

My issue I found out was not my RAM directly but a bad DIMM slot on my motherboard.

Cycle through your ram one stick at a time...then if that works (or if you located a bad stick) you can always move on to trying 1 stick in different DIMM slots.

 

[Mascarpone]

thank you guys!

So out of 4 memory bank 3 were faulty. I'm going to change ram, but a new problem appeared:

the fourth memory bank seems to work fine, memory test doesn't report anything and Ubuntu live Cd boots fine. But when i try to install it doesn't work. The installation freeze.

I resolved this by making a very small partition (10 gb on a 1 TB hd) and it worked fine. Maybe the disk is broken?

I'm afraid that maybe it's the motherboard, could it be? I don't want to ship the disk for nothing,

p.s.: powenick, is your avatar from the atari videogame, the one with the ship in the space? 😀

 

[NoQuarter]

whoa, ok 3 memory banks, as in slots, were faulty, or 3 sticks of ram? There's no way you should have 3 bad sticks of ram, that sounds more like the mobo is bad.


Find one good stick of ram and test it in each slot, if it fails in some slots but not others the mobo is bad. If every slot works check the other sticks one at a time in one known good slot. If each stick of ram is good but you get bad ram error with 4 sticks in then it's the mobo again.


If you're really dealing with 3 bad ram sticks then I suspect something else. A lot of those fast speed RAM require higher than default voltage, you should check the specs for it and see if they mobo is upping the voltage properly for them, my mobo doesn't up the voltage automatically.


Also most mobos have to step back to 2T command rate with 4 sticks installed, perhaps it's been overridden to 1T command rate someplace in the bios memory settings. I believe some mobos even have to downclock the ram when 4 sticks are installed. Both these things should be automatic but might be worth manually doing just to get a better idea of what's happening since it seems pretty drastic.


Lastly a bios update can improve memory stability but this isn't something you want to do unless you can find a way to get the system stable first.

Also if it does turn out to be bad ram, Corsair's RMA policy should be good enough to get them replaced for you.

 

[daniel49]

if your motherboard starts blowing through Ram like The Govt spends money its time to say goodbye to the board. Have seen a couple go that route, replace bad ram and if it blows out the new ones, you got your answer.Hopefully thats not your problem.