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Last modified: Tue Aug 7 13:52:24 2001

Testing PC Memory
It looks as if after the Taiwan earthquake in 1999, the quality of OEM memories in the market has dropped significantly. This is less of a problem for Windows users than it is for Linux due to differences in the way memory is accessed.

We had several PC servers delivered to DESY which would show severe problems already during installation, but were doing fine with Windows NT in the EPOS workshop. In all cases, replacing the memories cured the problems.

Our consequence was that Linux servers are ordered exclusively with ECC memories now. It is definitely worth the additional investment, judging by the time we had spent on debugging before. DESY standard PCs do not have ECC memory, but are ordered with brand chips instead of OEM; the price difference is almost negligible.

If your Linux PC seems to behave unstable for no apparent reason, memory may be the culprit. Chris Brady has written memtest86, a nice tool to check memories.

I a making a binary version of the bootable floppy image available here. Download it to your disk and put it on a floppy with 

dd if=memtest.bin of=/dev/fd0 bs=8192
Insert this floppy into the PC to examine and boot from it, memtest will then start automatically. See Chris's web page for documentation.

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Document Status: mature, updated as required

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