Over the past few hours, my potato machine has been behaving very strangely. Many of the files on my hard drive or which I read from cdrom have minor errors. Specifically, at a random point in the file, two consecutive bytes are changed to 160 and 192 (240 300 octal). Moreover, this often repeats every 4194305 bytes! (That 2 to the 22nd power, plus 1.) Only large files seem to be affected, and this makes sense given the large gap between the bad bytes. However, I believe that the files on the disks are fine because the problem goes away sometimes. For example, during a period when the computer was misbehaving, I wrote a tar file to cd. Now I get
% cmp -l copy-on-cdrom copy-on-hard-drive 2078721 240 53 2078722 300 74 6273026 240 127 6273027 300 374 10467331 240 46 10467332 300 304 14661636 240 344 14661637 300 151 Notice that the copy on the hard drive is now ok; it was misbehaving when the transfer was done, and so the transfer is corrupt. Also, % bzcap kernel-source-2.2.13.tar.bz2 > /dev/null used to produce bzcat: Data integrity error when decompressing. but now has gone back to being silent. I ran bzip2recover on the kernel source when it was misbehaving, and the components differ from what the file now contains by 240 300 at one spot. Can anyone tell me what might be happening here? Is there software I can use to help diagnose this? My hardware: Transmonde Vivante SE, 6G IDE HD, scsi pcmcia card hooked to Yamaha 4416S cdrw. I read the list, but you are encouraged to cc your replies directly to me. Thanks very much, Dan -- Dan Christensen [EMAIL PROTECTED]