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
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.
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
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)
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.
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
NOPE! it ran for 3 hours, threw a ton of memory errors, then crashed in the same matrixy way.
So, back to just one pair of sticks, and I'm gonna let memtest run for a while and see if that seems stable.
OK so ran the half-ram test for nearly 8 hours with zero issues.
Now I've reattached the GPU, usb ports, serial port, floppy drives, and rust drives and optical drives (but not the m.2 ssds yet because they're boot drives) and I'm running it again, to confirm it's not a PSU problem
No issues after running for 4 hours!
I'll leave it on overnight but this seems to be functional
The only thing that's not back in is the two m.2 drives, which I doubt will make much difference.
We'll see!
