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Help: Randomly corrupting data

Blackberry Junkie

Senior member
This seemed like the best place to post this, since at this point the only thing I haven't replaced is my motherboard, memory, and processor.
I need some advice. I have a system which, upon writing large files, randomly corrupts them. I've low leveled the drives, replaced the network card, and taken great pains to ensure that I do things The Right Way.

The specific symptoms are as follows: Upon downloading large files, or reading them (sometimes) off of the HD or CDROM, I get random corruption. This occurs regardless of operating system (98 SE and 2000, in this case) as well as drive format (FAT32 98SE flavor, NTFS5). I've tried files of various sizes (anyewhere from 1 meg of drivers to 57 megs of Half Life Counterstrike) and 2 times out of 3, the file will fail it's CRC check on decompressing.

What's more disturbing is, before this began happening, I was rather proud to say I had a really stable, hand-built system. Rarely crashed, never lost data. It was about as rock-solid as a Microsoft based PC could get. Now, it crashes constantly, registries get corrupted, apps get hosed, etc. Not pretty.

The specs:
MSI K7 Pro
AMD Thunderbird Slot A 750 Mhz (not overclocked)
256MB PC133 EMS HSDRAM
Adaptec 2940U2W (flashed to 2.57.2, purchased not 3 days ago)
Quantum Atlas 10K II 18.2 GB
Plextor Ultraplex Wide 40X
PlexWriter 8x2x20
Matrox 32 MB G400 Max

Now, before I go spending even more money, I wanted to beg and plead for some opinions. What does this sound indicitive of? What should I look to replace first? I've had one opinion so far that it may very well be bad memory. There was also an issue some time ago (though the problem began before I discovered this) in that the mobo was not tightened down to the mounting posts, resulting in shorting if I changed out a card. Is it possible that, as a result, I fried my (pick one: mobo/memory/cpu)?

I beseech all of thee. I am at your mercy. I humbly seek wisdom that I might compute again, freely, before all is lost. 🙁
 
Well, my first guess right off the top would be.....The file was bad before you downlaoded it...If you know thats not the case, my second guess would definitely be memory. Check that, if its not...Well.....Then it starts to get kinda tricky....
 
Download and run at least 20 or more burn in loops of DocMemory to see if your RAM is bad. It is a very good RAM tester that runs from a boot disk, and is free.
 
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