More system woes...

Q

quadnad

Supreme [H]ardness
Joined
Oct 24, 2005
Messages
7,656
So I found out after doing a few tests that my Ballistix RAM had gone bad. Everything from random programs crashing to blue screens to refusing to boot to windows. Morale of the story is an RMA, and I'm current using a friends 512 stick of corsair. Fine and great.

Now I see that sometimes when I'm downloading rar files (large ones), some of the items in the archive are corrupt. I know that these files aren't corrupt (on the other end). Now that I'm using RAM that I'm sure is working just fine, wtf could be the problem? Could the hard drive be going? Could it be my motherboard? My CPU (I doubt that, considering it seems fine in Prime95)?

All of the problems (including those caused by the RAM) began after I was finding my hardware maxes, as per the OC guide. I didn't push anything farther than it needed, and was cautious.

What kind of diagnostics should I be running to test my motherboard and/or HDs to check their integrity?
 
Hmm... Overclocking can corrupt your filetable, and then subsequent files written to the drive would contain errors. Only way to fix that is to reformat, afaik.

As far as checking it... I'd run memtest96 and MAKE SURE you're not getting memory errors, especially during the last 10% of test 5. If you get any errors there, anything that passes through the memory bus can be coming out garbled.
 
Well, I'm currently running on borrowed RAM from my buddy as I'm waiting for crucial to send me back my sticks. I suppose I should give my puter a reformat though anyway...I just end up pushing it off b/c I'm a lazy bastard....
 
And you're sure you've got all the settings for the borrowed ram at default? FSB, timings, voltage etc?
 
Yeah, I'm 99% sure. 2.5-3-3-8 @ DDR400. Pretty loose timings. I've started to get some strange errors now as well...my torrents aren't starting properly anymore. It seems like things are devolving slowly....

So do you think a reformat is the next step? or are there any diagnostics I can run? For some reason, everything seems prime stable, so I think you could be right about the corrupted file table.

EDIT: I just had a thought: could this be the onboard NIC f'ing up? I connected to my FTP earlier today and it gave me a few errors I've never seen before. Maybe thats the reason the files I get from the internet are sometimes corrupted?
 
So I've checked everything I can, but I'm still not sure. All my rails are completely stable, the It's either the motherboard itself, the on-board NIC, or the HD. I'm going to pop in a NIC card from an old computer and use that for a while, to see if thats the issue.

Does anyone know of any diagnostic programs to test the integrity of a HD? Any easy way of testing whether the hard drive is the issue (other than trading in another drive, as I don't have another one that I can reformat right now to test).

Can a bad mobo cause data corruption?
 
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