Faulty ram = bad.

Man, last night was fun… Not
I was trying to copy some stuff to my mythbuntu box (which the family has taken a big liking to), and it was very slow. I would normally get 7MB/s off the network but was only getting 2MB/s and the copy would pause every few mintues for up to 2 mins.
Anyway, I checked htop (better version of top) and it showed the CPU usage was 100% on both CPU cores when copying even though the Samba daemon was only using about 30%. There was also some random mythtv log file services that would use crazy amounts of resources every few minutes, but the log file wasn’t being written to.

So I restarted the box, and it decided that it hadn’t scanned the HDD in 700 odd days, and it started to scan the drive and find various errors. After trying to repair the drive a few times and it kept finding more problems, I restarted the Linux box again and ran Mem test, on a hunch that the new ram I’d installed a week before was faulty.
!LOTS of errors! I pulled and changed some sticks around until I found the offending ram stick. Then had to run fsck manually, say yes to everything and it finally booted properly.

I think one of my Battlestar Galactica TV eps was ruined, but better than the 320Gb’s of movies and TV eps being wiped.

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Categorised as geeky, Home

By Michael Kubler

Photographer, cinematographer, web master/coder.

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