I have an intallation problem with a dual OS set up and even though I am qute sure its hardware related I am not 100% certain
Maybe somebody has had this before or can confirm my first impression. Before I take the PC back to the shop

I have just set up a new computer for a friend. Its a brand new machine with an AMD 2.0Go, Matsonic main board , ATI Radeon on board sound card , ethernet card and 2 * 40Go HD.

I have installed WinXP on the first drive and Mandrake 10 on the second. This is a set up that I have done numerous times and I know it works.

First thing is that when I boot the computer I get a message on the screen telling me to check my PC or signal cable I am not quite sure if the PC is booting or not I tend to think no.

I plugged in an other screen and its the same problem so its not that.

It starts after a while either by waiting 15/20 minutes or rebooting it several times.
XP can start up but after a while the screen can just freeze after 30 minutes or so On the other hand it can run all day ...?? ! Strange

I can start Gnome but not KDE ( unless I log in as ROOT ) Otherwise the KDE loading screen comes up and just hangs at 85% then the screen just goes blue and stays like that..




Is there some kind of test I can do to see if its coming from either a faulty graphic set up ( ATI card / AGP*4 )
or simply a rotten main board .

Have you done a memcheck/RAM-Check ?

Hi
Thanks for your answer

No I havent done this I am not too sure how to accomplish this

( the PC has 256 Mo ram )

Do you think that this problem could be due to a faulty memory stick
??

Maybe, I have RAM with 3200 printed on it, but stable is only 2700.
Otherwise it makes big trouble: Crashes of programms or the whole system, strange behavior and some other things.
And it never happend at the same point again. (I took me 3 days !)

I use Suse and if you boot it from CD/DVD you can choose memtest in the first menu. Others should be similar or you an download a CD-ROM ISO at http://www.memtest.org

A memory stick is good for photos, but not so good as data storage. My original Sony memory stick is only usable in the camera through the built-in USB connector. In a card-reader is it usable only below a few megabytes.

Sorry about that Im not sure if I was clear my mistake ..

when I said memory stick I meant the the memory in the PC .

I see. I had both problems, overclocked memory inside the PC (=random crashes) and once a bad memory stick from a camera (=sometimes very long access time for drives and it hungs several minutes if I wanted to access the stick itself).

Back to your memory in the PC (RAM):
Yes, a faulty memory is a real bad thing, due the software is never at the same position, it's very hard to catch it: you will not notice a few pixels in the wrong color but if a programm is at the bad place it crashes.
The ratio is near 256 000 000 : 1 if only one bit is weak.

Very bad is, if the speed is just a little too high, the errors happens seldom.

I would download the ISO of Knoppix (the Live-Linux from CD) and run "memtest" in the boot prompt. I like Knoppix, it's very good for testing without an installation.