On Fri, 02 Aug 2013 20:20:35 +1000 Daniel Jitnah <djitnah@greenwareit.com.au> wrote:
On 02/08/13 18:50, rdbrown@pacific.net.au wrote:
Hi all,
I have a laptop that is failing to boot - starts boot but then stops.(any boot media: HD, CD or USB, same result)
It reports 1007Mb on bios memory check, which seems like a strange number to me??? (it also has 16Mb reserved - so it seems to have lost 1Mb??- it has 1Gb installed) - is this likely a memory stick problem? I think Ubuntu at least installs the Memory tester in the grub menu. I'd be surprised if Fedora didn't. If it is there booting into it and letting it run for a while should answer the question.
Yes did that. It did not show error. But the same memory stick showed errors when plugged in another laptop!
A memory test is not just testing the memory. It's testing the motherboard, the socket, and the connection. You can plug a DIMM into a system twice and have it not work the first time but work the second time. If a system with multiple DIMMs reports a memory error and you don't know which DIMM is at fault (AFAIK only servers allow you to determine which DIMM is at fault) then the procedure is to remove DIMMs one at a time until the problem stops. Then you add the DIMM back again to see if the problem happens again. If the DIMM fails in the same socket then you should try it in another socket to see if the socket is at fault. I've got some systems in service with known socket problems. For example my home firewall is a P3 desktop system with 2*256M DIMMs, as the chipset doesn't support more than 512M total the fact that the 3rd socket is empty doesn't cause any problems. As for having only 1007MB, there are lots of ways that the chipset can reserve some memory. A memory stick problem definitely won't cause less memory to be visible, the supported stick capacities are all powers of 2. -- My Main Blog http://etbe.coker.com.au/ My Documents Blog http://doc.coker.com.au/