Hi, I have been looking to installing XBUNTU noticing on the boot menu a memory tester. I was surprised to see that half way through the test it found three addresses on three different channels that were faulty.

Does this mean I should get new SODIMMS or will i still be able to install the os.

Is LINUX more intolerant of hardware memory problems than windows. I have win2k and it does't complain about memory issues.

I try to get a second opinion from some other software. Your BIOS may have an option to do a complete test at boot, although this is often disabled in default configurations to save boot time. I like to know other peopleś suggestions for this sort of thing.

try using hirens boot cd.. there r hell lot of tools for diagonising the physical memory..

Hi, keep in mind my earlier question, since neither XBUNTU or OpenSUSE install, the install process ends with a memorry error message. Something to do with out of memory. And I chose XBUNTU as a light weight OS.

My BIOS is PHEONIX version A15. It has POST minimal, automatic and Thourough. I set it to thourough but is still booting normally.

So we are back to the question whether windows is less tolerant of hardware blemishes. I am using the same system in win2k and it seems quite fast.

Can you send me some links to free software to check my memory.

Memtest86 is a pretty thorough at memory testing. How much RAM you have and your processor speed will determine how long it will take, but I generally leave it running overnight. You can get it from here as a liveCD: http://www.memtest86.com/download.html. This is their homepage: http://www.memtest86.com/. Having said all that, I think that the memory testing app on the Xubuntu install CD is memtest, but this way you get the most up-to-date version.

I think (warning: opinion rather than fact) that if Windows was already installed before the memory corrupted, then it would probably work better - you might find that maxing RAM usage in Windows causes it to blue screen, in the same way that the installers fail due to memory issues. It's not that one handles it better than the other, it's that one doesn't see the bad memory as it's rarely using all the RAM. Again, opinion rather than fact

Regardless, what memory test i use there seems to be some problems with my dimms. Does that mean I have to fork out for new dimms before I can install Linux. I tried Lime, Slax, Puppy and Xbuntu.

The only one that came close was PCLinux minimal. And that was just the desktop but mouse would't work.

If I have to get new dimms it'g going to defer the migration for a month or two.

Short answer - YES.
In fact I've found Linux (itself) significantly more susceptible to memory glitches then even memtest. Even to not liking the "same" memory - each/either stick might work, but not both together.
Windoze doesn't seem to care.

There is quite a bit of code in the kernel to optimize for things like cache alignment - maybe it makes it a little less tolerant as well.

You might like to search on "badram patch" for some background one possible solution that never got into the mainline.

If memtest shows failures then you need to replace the faulty Memory.

If you have more than 1 pierce of RAM, pull one out and run the test again. keep swapping till you isolate the bad memory module. might only be one stick that's bad.

I use memtest86 as well for all my RAM testing needs.

Thanks for the advice guys. Although I was hoping this migration thing was going to cost so much.

It's a bummer about your hardware getting a fault. You might take some small comfort in the fact that it is usually better to find out sooner rather than later with this sort of thing...

Well, if memtest is showing indications of bad RAM, it's clearly not the operating system that is to blame. I'm puzzled that you haven't seen any files getting corrupted over the past days/weeks. The reason that some of the isos fail to install may be precisely because they got corrupted because of bad RAM. If you still have them on disk, you should grab the md5sums and verify their integrity.