Hello all,
Ever since I bought my AMD64 system (AMD 64 3000+, Asus K8U-X
motherboard) I've been experiencing random freezes, in which the system
completely stops to respond, or sometimes automatic reboots. Sometimes
the system halts during boot with a message such as
HARDWARE ERROR
CPU 0: Machine Check Exception: 4
Bank 4: b200000000070f0f
TSC a38a02f0b
This is not a software problem!
The crashes do not necessarily happen when the system is doing
something ram or processor intensive. I can do heavy tasks such as video
encoding with no problems, but sometimes the system crashes when it's
idle, only background tasks running. Also, the crashes are not so frequent.
When I bought the system, it had one stick with 512Mb of RAM.
Crashes already happened then. Later I added anoter stick with 1Gb of
RAM. I suspected the memory, and ran memtest only. But it was for a
short time, so in fact I cannot conclude anything from the lack of errors.
So I took of the "old" 512Mb ram module, because it should be the
one with problems, since the crashes happened already when I had only
that one. The system still crashed. Just to be sure, I put it on again,
and only this one, and the system also crashes. The motherboard has two
slots for RAM. I tried both modules in both slots, and I did notice that
when a module (either one) is in one of the slots, the system crashes
just after boot --- at most I can type the password and let KDE start,
but it crashes before KDE is fully loaded. With a module in the other
slot, then the system is usable most of the times.
So, am I really unlucky to have two memory modules with problems, or
what else should I suspect? Motherboard? Processor? What would be the
possible ways to diagnose the problem?