On Thu, 26 Jan 2006 21:01:02 -0800, Leland Sheppard
I don't know why that first drive has no temp. reading. I noticed that too.
It and the one listed after it are both 120gb WD drives which I purchased
the same day.
Wow, that is strange! Do they have the same board part numbers and
model numbers? Are they connected to the same sort of controller? By
120G, I'd expect all HDs to monitor temperature, it's usually 20G, 10G
and smaller that come up as --C.
I buy drives in pairs because I use one to back up the other so I always get
2 at the same time.
OK - it's RAID- and board-swap-friendly too ;-)
Regarding memory - no. It's not ECC. Don't know how XP detects corruption...
Me neither. Even when there's parity error checking, it's nearly
always the BIOS that steps in with a Black Screen of Death, rather
than a polite Windows error dialog and log entry. That's why I'm
thinking that "memory error" is spurious, or possibly an "out of
memory" error that is almost equally likely to be spurious.
Interestingly, I went through the device manager list and did an 'update
driver' on EVERY device or pseudo device on the system. One device showed a
driver problem - my HP PSC750XI - and I let XP update the driver from MS.
Ew... I wouldn't do that (as discussed a while back in another
thread). MS is the wrong place to get drivers, unless desperate.
Since that driver was installed, I have not had a crash (knocking on the
nearest piece of wood). I have gone as much as a week or 10 days without a
crash before only to have them return so I'm not rejoicing yet. Cautiously
optimistic is the phrase that comes to mind... It's been 6 or 7 days now, I
think...
It could be, either by genuinely updating some driver error, orsimply
by replacing damaged code files for the same (or even later) driver
version. This is particularly likely if the HP device was added at a
time you had bad RAM; the original driver code files could have been
corrupted as they were being created. Bad RAM = baaad news.
I will go get the memory test you mentioned. I'm not really too concerned
about the memory. I got the error with the original memory and swapped it
for a new batch and still got the error. The MS diagnostic says it is
usually hardware; not always. I'm guessing this thing has been software.
Secondary damage.
Primary effects of bad RAM are transient, random, poorly
reproduceable, and typically cover all scopes and contexts.
But when this causes secondary corruption of the hard drive contents,
this secondary damage will often be limited to certain contexts, and
reproduceable within those contexts, e.g. mileage such as "whenever I
do abc, the system does xyz".
These effects will persist after the bad RAM is replaced, and then be
even more "static" (limited to specific scopes and contexts,
reproduceable) as the primary effects of bad RAM are removed.
Secondary damage can affect anything, because any disk read can be
bit-flipped to a disk write, and any disk address to be written to can
be bit-flipped to write to an arbitrary raw disk address instead.
However, it will most likely affect code created (installed) since the
RAM went bad - making "just re-install Windows" a disaster.
Doing a defrag can have the same effect.
In the case of a recently added hardware item, the drivers for that
item may be corrupted. A "repair install" done after the RAM is fixed
won't replace these code files, and if these code files are always in
effect, the result can be ongoing, broadly-scoped hell.
So you may well have "whacked the rat" - well done, if so!
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