DDRAMn it!

[LycosV]

Now that I have lured you in with my witty title I swamp you with my problem. Two days ago I got my new RAM (2x512 Corsair) and added it to my computer (2x256 HyperX). Everything was going hunky dory (games worked great, windows ran super fast) until yesterday. Windows blue screened on me and in the process corrupted ntdll.dll. I tried restoring the DLL file by booting into my second OS of .net 2003, but that didn't work. Later on my .net 2003 install got busted up too, but this is where it gets really weird. When I attempted to reinstall Windows XP it would tell me that irrecoverable errors existed on the hard drive (the one where XP and 2003 were) that prevented formatting or scandisking. The 2003 install was a little more hospitable allowing me to get most of the way through installation before crashing. I took out the new RAM and moved some of the dimms around. Windows finally allowed me to format the HD, so I got XP up and running. I put the new memory back in (in different slots) and booted up memtest to run last night. The instant memtest started it detected a whole bunch of errors. How fast it did it was a little weird so I restarted the computer and ran it for 8 hours, no errors were detected. I reinstalled UT2004 this morning and played it for like an hour, no problems.

My gut instinct tells me the RAM is bad, or my motherboard doesn't like 4 dimms in there at the same time. The 8hours of error free memtest makes me think the 1/2 second errors was some sort of fluke. Do you think the RAM is bad?

My second guess is the hard drive. Because both copies of windows were on the same HD it would explain both of them going funky on me.

Final guess, some sort of virus on my computer that norton didn't detect (norton runs on fridays, the computer died on thursday, worst day for a virus).

Let me know what you guys think, I'm a little confused here.

[jAkUp]

Try just the 2 Corsairs by theirself.

[Q]

Thread

Title

Rocks

In a really cheesy way.

Run Memtest 86 for a while.....and do what jakup said.

[Kickus_assius]

Make sure you are using the highest timings of the two sets. Eg. If the corsair are 6-2-2-2 and hyperx is 6-2-2-2.5, set the timings to the hyperx. If they both have the same timings then you have no problem.

Another thing to note is that when you have corrupted files from ram windows is usually able to auto-correct it the next time you boot with good ram.

[LycosV]

Qlitchford: Thanks for the positive comment on the thread title, I thought it was the good kind of cheesy. I've ran memtest for two nights in a row and nothin, it hasn't crahsed since I reinserted all the RAM. Maybe it wasn't seated right? But that still doesn't explain the 4000 errors memtest reported in the first couple seconds of running that one time.

Kickus_assius: I got the timings set to the lowest common denomenator (the highest timings). Are you saying if I had just taken out the RAM and rebooted my computer I might not have had to format the HD? *drops to knees screaming* NOOOOOO!!! *lieing to self* Actually my computer kind of needed a good reformat anyway.