Since Prime95 is a processor intensive task, it can easily make system errors show up due to overheating. Prime95 is used a lot by overclockers to test their systems when they increase the chip speed. I'd hazard a guess that the errors you guys saw were due to Prime95 taxing your system so much that somewhere along the way the disk drivers wrote some bad data out to the HD.
What is odd is that most antivirus programs will catch if a program tries to write to the boot sector, so if you had one running at the time you were running Prime95, I'd be fairly certain that the cause is faulty hardware that is showing up when Prime95 runs just because Prime95 is taxing your system to the point that the hardware errors show up. I'd be interested to see if you run some other CPU crunching program and see if the same behavior manifests itself. Jeremy Blosser -----Original Message----- From: Alberto Manuel Bertoli E. [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] Sent: Tuesday, March 22, 2005 1:57 PM To: Tom Duda; The Great Internet Mersenne Prime Search list Subject: Re: [Prime] Unexpected and baffling problem -----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE----- Hash: SHA1 Tom Duda wrote: > Hello > > Last Thursday, primality testing (L-L) began on my machine. As I had been told, this phase is the most RAM-intensive part of the operations of Prime95. What I did not expect was that the boot sector of my system partition became corrupted. I first permitted Prime95 to remain installed; I booted to the Recovery Console (installed on my machine as a boot-time option) and typed FIXBOOT. The system partition was repaired. The next time I attempted to boot to the desktop, I again encountered a problem with the boot sector. I uninstalled Prime95 and executed FIXBOOT. Since then, there has not been a problem. > > You will say ?It is impossible for Prime95 to do anything with the boot sector.? I will agree with you. All I know is what I saw. And no, there are no viruses, worms, trojans, etc. on my machine. I ran my antivirus software and all three of my anti-spyware/trojan utilities. I keep my definitions up to date and run those tools quite often. > > Something corrupted my boot sector. By coincidence, the corruption happened on the same day that Prime95 began primality testing. By similar coincidence, the corruption stopped when Prime95 was uninstalled. hmmmmm. > > Tom Duda > hello, last weekend it happened something like that, i run WinXP pro SP2 on PIII-500mhz 196RAM and almost 24h/day runnig prime239, saturday i've downloaded the prime246 and all went ok, sunday i was playing diabloII and my pc rebooted but when in the grub menu (fedora C1) could not load anymore my win partition... it was deleted, what could be the reason? no viruses, i use avg and was up-to-date, well the bad point is that all the work is lost... alberto bertoli -----BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE----- Version: GnuPG v1.2.4 (MingW32) Comment: Using GnuPG with Netscape - http://enigmail.mozdev.org iD8DBQFCQHh9FtJp6tIiMqcRAnVrAKCeYPCBZCBq2Z7qE4nZPmoSeENBqgCdGWq2 wjxpX4h32zV+y0jpaxWPYpo= =kqcu -----END PGP SIGNATURE----- _______________________________________________ Prime mailing list [email protected] http://hogranch.com/mailman/listinfo/prime _______________________________________________ Prime mailing list [email protected] http://hogranch.com/mailman/listinfo/prime
