I can't believe that all five of anything went bad at the same time. Could they have been tampered with? Is anyone unhappy with the company going belly up? Perhaps a big magnet, a power serge, hooked up to the 440 in the plant, a handful of Iron filings maybe, crushed some resistors with a pliers, any bullet holes in the case? will windows install? Did windows boot when you got them? It could be anything, the Mobo is most likely but it could be the power supply, the processor, even the power itself. a last resort would be to take a working system, which passes memtest, and replace one component at a time from a non working system and run the memtest between each swap. That is a lot of work tho. mobos don't take as long to swap as you would think, just be careful, and be grounded. - tom On Thu, 2004-03-04 at 19:42, Carl Zeilon wrote: > I would have to concur but, ALL 5? What brand are these boards? Try > updating the BIOS. Check the batteries, I've seen extremely weird > unexplainable behavior in the past. Keep us posted. > > At 06:58 PM 3/4/2004, you wrote: > >Well, it sounds to me like you have issues with the motherboards, not the > >RAM..... > >On Thu, 4 Mar 2004, Patrick McCabe wrote: > > > > > I inherited 5 identical computers, Pentium III 800 MHZ. They were used > > > as windows workstations by the company next door that went belly-up. My > > > plan has been to load Linux on them and replace our windows file servers. > > > > > > The problem is that I ran memtest86 and they ALL fail. The memtest > > > documentation talks about false positives, so I thought memtest just > > > didn't play well with this system. I tried loading Linux (Mandrake 9.2) > > > on a few of them. One install complained of a memory problem, but two > > > succeeded and seem to work ok. However, when I copied a .5 gig file > > > across the network, it came across corrupted. > > > > > > How can this be? These computers have been used apparently successfully > > > for at least a couple years. I have tested the memory chips in other > > > systems and they all pass; I have put new memory in these systems and > > > they all fail. > > > > > > Things I have tried so far: > > > -Swap memory chips > > > -Set bios to fail-safe defaults > > > -Twiddle various bios entries that deal with ram > > > > > > Should I just write these guys off, or is there something I can do to > > > fix this? > > > > _______________________________________________ > TCLUG Mailing List - Minneapolis/St. Paul, Minnesota > http://www.mn-linux.org tclug-list at mn-linux.org > https://mailman.real-time.com/mailman/listinfo/tclug-list -- Tom Penney <blots at visi.com> _______________________________________________ TCLUG Mailing List - Minneapolis/St. Paul, Minnesota http://www.mn-linux.org tclug-list at mn-linux.org https://mailman.real-time.com/mailman/listinfo/tclug-list