View Single Post - obscure memory error, any ideas/thoughts?

ragingphoenx · Rated PG

First of all, forgive me if I'm intruding on your forums, this just seemed like a good place to get an answer.

Background:
I'm running a Compaq Presario 8000z with an Athlon XP 1800 (it's an old system, I know). About a year and a half ago I decided I needed to upgrade a bit, so, among other things, I bought a gig (2x512) of pc 2100 ddr (PQI MD641GUOE-X2 to be exact). From that time until roughly 3 days ago all has been running well.

Problem:
So 3 days ago I start getting random memory read errors, some of which are causing hard reboots and screwing up system files. I run memtest86 from a knoppix cd to see what it will tell me and I get a bunch of errors during the last few % of test 5. Figuring one of my dimms is bad, I pull one out, rerun memtest and...go figure, no errors. So with the single dimm in I get my OS up and running again. But then curiosity gets the gets the better of me and I dig back out the knoppix CD and rerun the memtest, but this time with the other dimm in (the supposedly bad one).

This is where it gets perplexing, the memtest got no errors. I go back to the full gig configuration and run memtest, and get errors again, still in the last few % of test 5. Now, completely confused I run a memtest on each possible configuration (each dimm in each slot separately, and the two configs with both in). In each case with a single dimm there were no errors, and all tests with both dimms had errors (though the # of errors did vary from 30 or so to around 30000).

Anyone ever heard of anything like this, or maybe know where I might find an answer?