On Wednesday 01 April 2009 12:59, Charles G Montgomery wrote: > If anyone has an idea what the problem might be, or just suggestions > of things to test, that would be greatly appreciated.
A "stuck" (burned out) memory line driver would behave like that if it affected the upper address lines. In that case, data sent to a higher address would just overwrite data at a lower address. The line drivers used to be 8 or 16 bits wide. What you are observing may not be a genuine out-of-memory detection, but an overwrite of the parameter table with data intended for elsewhere. Perhaps memtest86 doesn't look for errors of that sort. I don't know if Linux has an equivalent of BASIC's POKE and PEEK. If it does, erase a data word in high memory; set a word in low memory; see if the word high memory changed. This must be done for every pair of memory lines. But I suspect memtest86 does this; it is easy enough. It should not be necessary to run a test for more than one complete scan of the memory. This problem appears every time. It is a hard error, not an intermittent error. You might try to boot DSL (Damn Small Linux) which only requires 16MB of RAM. Things have changed a lot since I designed computers, but perhaps this insight will lead to a solution. Please report what you eventually find. Jim Kuzdrall _______________________________________________ gnhlug-discuss mailing list gnhlug-discuss@mail.gnhlug.org http://mail.gnhlug.org/mailman/listinfo/gnhlug-discuss/