Yesterday I wasn't able to access /dev/hdc for some reason. I tried a fresh install of Slack 9 and the 5 times I tried, I kept getting segmentation fault errors. 2 of the 5 times the install/setup finished, I tried to compile a kernel and got more segmentation fault errors and compiler errors. I tried to install Windows and got some error on a blue screen in the top left corner. I tried a few more times to install Windows and it kept freezing at the setup screen. Obviously some part of my hardware is faulty. Would it be maybe ram or hd?

probably a stupid question but are you sure you have permissions to /dev/hdc?

I was root and it didn't have anything to do with permissions.

I'm thinking I have bad ram, but before I buy another stick I'd like to see if anyone has ran into this before.

you know what... you don't have over 1 Gig of ram do you? I have 1024 MB ran (2 x 512 sticks) and I compiled 'big memory' support into my kernel. After that when I would be compiling software I would get random errors ... sometimes in ./configure or make. then I would rerun make or configure and the problem would not be there. So I promptly turned off bigmem support in the kernel and deal with not being able to use the remaining 120+ megs of memory.

ive had the windoze freezing during install program, which is why im using mandrake 8.2 now but i didnt think about replacing my RAM because i dont get freezing on linux. its probably a BIG bug in windoze, or maybe my compy just doesnt like windoze