On 18/06/07, Claude Jones wrote:
> > Had a similar problem. > Turned out I had a bad ram module - and it really fubar'd things. Well, maybe - I had that once a long time ago, and it rendered a Windows 2k system unbootable. It was so strange that I reconstructed the problem, and put the offending ram module back in, and booted up with the Pres and my associate admin looking on, and it happened again! But, in this case, my machine is coming up and running, and everything works. Maybe I'll try booting in to windows, just to double check... Other suggestions offered have made substantial progress, however
Running w2k successfully on the same machine is no sufficient test to rule out that the RAM is bad. You would not be the first person to run into that trap. If it isn't RPM that is hit hard by hardware instability, it's a different application that creates a memory usage/load pattern which exposes the hardware problems. GCC, for example. Many users have seen spontaneous segmentation faults and believed them to be bugs in the compiler, even when subsequent runs of Make continued for a while. A lot of problems with RPM are due to hardware problems or attempts at disturbing RPM at run-time.
