So my linux box recently went through the computer equivalent of a slow, painful death. Mysterious data corruption and hardware failures were everywhere, and I had to put it down.

Now that I've moved all the functions of the old box over to Polychoron, I'm trying to isolate the problem in the old box. I've got it stripped down to just a hard drive and a video card and it's still causing poorly-documented hardware errors. When I try to install Windows2000, the install floppy tells me that it couldn't install HAL.DLL (the hardware abstraction layer libraries) because of...

error code 7

So that helps a lot... and the Microsoft website helps even less, stopping just short of actual aid. Linux will install but then kernel panics randomly while running such exotic programs as the Bourne shell. I did actually get the box to accept an install of MS-DOS 6.2 and then Windows 3.11, which uplifted its status from paper-weight to eye-sore. Anyway, I know reading about this sort of thing is almost as exciting as having to sit here and swap the disks yourself. So I won't ramble on about it.

But the point is, and you're going to be let down by this because there isn't much of one, that I'm now reduced to swapping out individual pieces of hardware until I find out what's broken.

Jered told me about a cool program called Memtest86 which is OS-independant and does some really thourough testing of RAM. Jered says most weird hardware problems can be traced to bad RAM, so I'm giving this box the Memtest86 works. So far, it has been throwing bit patterns at the memory in various ways for eight hours, forty-three minutes, and five seconds with zero errors. Test #11, whatever that entails, takes forever. Isn't that interesting.

No. No it isn't.