So I ran memtest86+ on my desktop.
It didn't error!
or succeed. It just... hung, 25 minutes in.

that's probably not a good sign

I'm gonna have to start pulling parts out and get it down to a minimal hardware setup and see if it still crashes.

like, I probably could disconnect the floppy drives. those shouldn't be needed just to run memtest

even if they are clearly VITAL for day-to-day work

yanked the odd hardware like GPU and hard drives, as well as the common stuff like DVI video capture device, both floppy drives, optical drive, and serial port

I had to go find another keyboard though. my spare keyboard on hand is an AT keyboard, and while of course I have a (hand made!) AT-to-PS/2 adapter, this computer for some reason only has USB ports.

I can't understand these companies just expecting us to have obscure hardware on hand to diagnose their failures.

Alice Averlong🏳️‍⚧️

@foone@digipres.club

I normally have it plugged into a KVM but I'm bypassing that on the extreme off-chance that there's some weird interaction between the KVM and the PC

November 10, 2023 at 9:10:06 PM

WE'VE GOT ERRORS! hitting a bunch of RAM problems around 31-39gb.

nastily that's divided between two banks. So... it's probably not just one pair of DIMMS going bad.
(and of course it's also possible it's some other problem that's causing RAM issues)

yanked half the RAM to see if it still errors

with half ram, I did two successful passes of memtest86+, no errors. time to check THE OTHER HALF (to confirm if it was just a needs-reseating/too much ram for the mobo problem)

and it passes too.
So, either my motherboard has stopped being able to support 64gb, or it was just a reseating problem. Let's stick it back in and see.

that's... probably not a good sign

I really don't like that it corrupted outside of the text window.
That shouldn't be happening if this is just a RAM problem. That's like... a GPU corruption problem.

Which is very bad because I'm currently using the CPU's on-die GPU

pointed out that my ram sticks weren't properly interleaved. So I'm trying memtest again with that fixed

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