Machine Crashes After 1 Day

pete1234 · 05-15-2007, 07:17 AM

I just upgraded the ram on my laptop and ever since the machine crashes after exactly one day of uptime. I've tried reseeding the ram I ran memtest86(4 passes), and my bios memory check no errors were found. Also, the machine doesn't just turn off cold; my eterm windows go blank, they're still there, but with no text. Oddly opera still works, and I was able to open some photos I had on my hard drive to verify that it wasn't the drive that failed. However, I'm not able to kill X, or reboot the machine in anyway. I'm already being sent a replacement for what I belive is the faulty ram, but I'm just curious what's going on. Any help or insight is appreciated.

jay73 · 05-15-2007, 07:32 AM

Incompatible RAM sticks?

pete1234 · 05-15-2007, 07:39 AM

I doubt it. I ordered the ram straight from IBM (as I did my laptop), and they double checked the model number on the ram before they sent me a replacement.

jay73 · 05-15-2007, 07:53 AM

Yes, in that case, it is rather unlikely. You never know, though. A friend of mine recently added two sticks of Corsair PC6400 to his system - exactly the same type that was already installed - and the machine got completely unstable. No-one could figure out what was wrong - until some benchmarks revealed that one of his new sticks was actually PC 5400. The two came in a dual-channel kit and both were marked as being PC6400...

pete1234 · 05-15-2007, 07:59 AM

Well, hopefully the replacement ram fixes the problem. If not I guess I'll just return it and live with my original 768.

pete1234 · 05-17-2007, 01:16 PM

Okay so I had the 1.5 gigs of ram in my machine without high memory support enabled in the kernel (see this thread if you like http://www.linuxquestions.org/questi....php?t=554403). So I'm wondering/hoping that this was the cause of the crashes, or that maybe it was the same kernel option that was causing this problem http://www.linuxquestions.org/questi...d.php?t=554404. So I've got a few hours to wait, but perhaps someone knows if having over 1gig of ram in a machine without high memory support would cause a machine to crashes, or if the extra ram wouldn't just been ignored.

pete1234 · 05-17-2007, 03:55 PM

Code:

 uptime && free -m
  4:53pm  up 1 day  0:29,  17 users,  load average: 0.66, 0.29, 0.21
             total       used       free     shared    buffers     cached
Mem:          1898       1099        799          0         43        837
-/+ buffers/cache:        218       1680
Swap:          959          0        959

All is well. I suppose the problem was caused by not having high memory support enabled after all.