RE: Can't boot!

["Paul" <jpb entel ca>]

> -----Original Message-----
> From: fedora-list-bounces redhat com 
> [mailto:fedora-list-bounces redhat com] On Behalf Of Patrick 
> O'Callaghan
> Sent: Wednesday, May 13, 2009 6:47 PM
> To: fedora-list redhat com
> Subject: Re: Can't boot!
> 
> On Wed, 2009-05-13 at 21:25 -0400, William M. Quarles wrote:
> > S P Arif Sahari Wibowo wrote:
> > > On Wed, 13 May 2009, William M. Quarles wrote:
> > >> The computer seems to "die" right about when X is about to start.
> > > 
> > > Can you try <ctrl><alt><F1> (and F2, F3, ...) to see of console 
> > > login is on?
> > > 
> > OK, this PC is playing mean tricks on me. The past 10 times 
> I've tried 
> > to boot it, the boot has failed, and also, the keyboard stops 
> > responding (so <Ctrl><Alt><anything> doesn't work). This thing is 
> > behaving very inconsistently, because it just did a successful boot 
> > and I was able to log in.
> 
> I'd say do a thorough memory check. The brief check done by a 
> BIOS at boot time is not exhaustive enough and sporadic 
> memory errors can cause all kinds of random woe. I recently 
> pulled two 1GB sticks from my machine because memtest86+ 
> found problems (actually I think the problems are with the 
> motherboard slots rather the chips, but it amounts to the 
> same thing). The machine lost half its RAM but now it works 
> flawlessly.
> 
> http://www.memtest.org
> 
> poc

Are you by chance using some sort of nForce motherboard and DDR2 RAM? A lot
of them simply don't push enough juice to the RAM to support 4 sticks
without fiddling with the BIOS settings. Most often, reducing the RAM speed
(i.e.: from 1066MHz to 800MHz in my case) and increasing the voltage being
sent to the RAM slots does the trick.

- Paul