All,
I have an 030 cube with 64MB of RAM that began having a system fault while powered on. Subsequently, reboots were showing more and more severe disk messages as FSCK was being executed. After several reboots, it became less stable and finally, unbootable.
Initially, I thought it was the disk and a corrupted OS. I built a new OS from a spare system (a first time for me, thanks to this forum) and upon replacing disks initially the cube seemed fine but then a similar pattern of instability returned after a reboot.
Finally, as a really long shot guess, I recalled how there was a memory fault error on one of the system panics (which I originally thought was the OS) and thought to pull out half the memory reducing the system to 32MB. Following that, the system is once again fully stable (so far).
I can't be 100% certain that the memory is at fault, since pulling the memory out of the board I may have slightly affected some other connector, etc, but for now I will treat the memory as the root cause issue unless other symptoms develop.
I wanted to share my experience with the forum in case others have had similar issues, as well as ask if others have noted memory chip failures over the years? Is this common? I have read about capaciters, power supplies, and of course disk failures, but not memory...
Thanks,
John
Hi John,
I had a similar issue many years ago with my mono slab. Defective RAM resulted in corrupted files when copying or moving. After replacement of RAM everything was back to normal.
Luckily never experienced any similar problem later on.
Anyway I would suggest that you try testing the suspicious RAM e.g. in an old PC with memtest tool. Maybe it was just a contact problem and your RAM is still fine.
Greetings
Sven