Installling Bodhi 7Alpha4 broke my computer! (Not Really)
Apr 8, 2023 18:37:38 GMT
Hippytaff, ylee, and 1 more like this
Post by enigma9o7 on Apr 8, 2023 18:37:38 GMT
Back to my original topic, I finally found the root cause of the problem: bad memory!
Shortly before I'd tried all this, I'd put some more memory in. I had some family that were doing some spring cleaning and had some old 32-bit machines they were getting rid of, and I pulled all the ram and took it home, 3x1GB and 1x512.. Previously, my athlon had 3x512M, and has four memory slots, so I pulled out two of them and put in the three 1GB modules, making it 3.5GB.
When I first started having this problem, I certainly considered the new memory might be the problem, and ran the memory test from grub menu for 48 hours straight with no failures, so assumed that was wasn't it. I ran various tests on the hard drive, including destructive read write test, nothing fails.
I kinda gave up on the bodhi 7 install after a while, but noticed the machine would randomly lock every day or two, something it never used to do. So I finally got around to troubleshooting again, this time I took out one memory module a time and tried to clone the drive... and discovered that one of the memory modules when removed solves all problems.
So root cause of failure was bad or flakey memory module. I swapped around slots, but if that module was in, it would lockup within a few minutes if I tried to clone drives. So regardless of what the memory test says, that memory is BAD!
As to why it wouldn't boot with the hard drive messed up, I dunno that one exactly, but basically cuz the machine would lockup in the middle of the clone or the middle of the install it would mess up the partition table and the bios was too confused to know what to do.
So anyways, with working memory, it was quick and easy to clone my SSD over the the HD, wipe the SSD, and install Bodhi 7 alpha on it.
Shortly before I'd tried all this, I'd put some more memory in. I had some family that were doing some spring cleaning and had some old 32-bit machines they were getting rid of, and I pulled all the ram and took it home, 3x1GB and 1x512.. Previously, my athlon had 3x512M, and has four memory slots, so I pulled out two of them and put in the three 1GB modules, making it 3.5GB.
When I first started having this problem, I certainly considered the new memory might be the problem, and ran the memory test from grub menu for 48 hours straight with no failures, so assumed that was wasn't it. I ran various tests on the hard drive, including destructive read write test, nothing fails.
I kinda gave up on the bodhi 7 install after a while, but noticed the machine would randomly lock every day or two, something it never used to do. So I finally got around to troubleshooting again, this time I took out one memory module a time and tried to clone the drive... and discovered that one of the memory modules when removed solves all problems.
So root cause of failure was bad or flakey memory module. I swapped around slots, but if that module was in, it would lockup within a few minutes if I tried to clone drives. So regardless of what the memory test says, that memory is BAD!
As to why it wouldn't boot with the hard drive messed up, I dunno that one exactly, but basically cuz the machine would lockup in the middle of the clone or the middle of the install it would mess up the partition table and the bios was too confused to know what to do.
So anyways, with working memory, it was quick and easy to clone my SSD over the the HD, wipe the SSD, and install Bodhi 7 alpha on it.