I got a motherboard and processor from my brother that would be a great upgrade to my old P-III. I quickly secured a cheap stick of RAM and hooked everything up. The problem is that I couldn’t seem to get anything to install on the drives. It was always coming up with errors, causing a total failure. So, I bought a replacement motherboard, thinking that I might be having problems with the IDE connectors. I really wanted to use the board my bro gave me, though, as it had better capabilities.
I had the same issues with the new board, although the operating systems that were currently on the hard drives in the machine recognized the board and booted. I still received compression errors and files weren’t saving properly. Even after installing brand new IDE cables (the pretty round ones that glow under UV light), I still had these issues.
Programs that are memory intensive, like Firefox (yes, it is, all you naysayers - its the browser that I use, and likely a lot longer than you have, but its still got leaks), would crash for no apparent reason. Many games would just refuse to load. I began to suspect something else (which I should have checked before spending money).
It turns out that the cheap used memory module was priced so low for a reason. Its crap (to quote Fab from Linux Outlaws). A quick memory test with memtest86 indicated that there were errors on 5 of the tests in the thousands. Its a guarantee that I will have better luck with a good memory stick.
So, remember, if you’re getting I/O errors, check your memory first, as its pretty much the cheapest fix, and a likely suspect.
Memory is rather cheap. I’m not sure when the last time I bought memory. Being a sysadmin, I tend to get leftover components after upgrades and such and the company will usually write such things off. I’ve got so much RAM lying around, it’s not funny and it’s really not worth selling off.
I like to burn-in a computer with memtest86+ and mprime before using it, it helps narrow down frustrating errors.
Absolutely agree with you on this one. Years of experience have taught me that RAM is a big nuisance when it comes to random faults.
I got a different stick of RAM and things went swimmingly! So, now, instead of an aging P-III 1000mhz computer, running with a 66Mhz ATA controller (UDMA4/PIO4), I am now running an Athlon XP2500+ (@ stock speed for now - 1.83Ghz) with PC3200 RAM and ATA133 IDE (UDMA6) as well as SATA RAID. There’s also room for the neat aftermarket cooler that my bro sent with the setup without the need to do a bit of “creative surgery”. So, now I just have to source out some really cheap 1GB sticks of PC3200 so I can fill it witht he 3GB that it can handle (can we say compiling in RAM?).
This is great news, Corey! I wish the thought of faulty memory had crossed my mind after your first attempt to get your new machine up and running but instead I was perplexed and confused by these so called IDE / Sata errors. So the power of SATA is now with you! Its neat to know that your new machine is essentially 2.5 times more powerful than your old 1 GHZ computer because the 2500+ means it is equivelent to a 2.5 GHZ pentium 3 or 4 machine. Talk about an upgrade!
I’m sure once you have the 3GM of memory you will be installing Gentoo as well to see how fast things work. Make some notes when you install so I can gain from your experience. Though I think the RAM trick is a little bit gimmicky. The real time that one faces in dealing with any of these distributions is the configuring and troubleshooting aspect. I’ve never used any tricks to compile faster in Gentoo and it has never been an issue.
Yeah, I know what you mean. I’ve only found that using ccache and the –parallel-fetch flag are useful. They do cut the compile in 1/2 for portage upgrades. But, I don’t know if Gentoo is worthy of this machine. I may have to skip Linux in favor of FreeBSD.