[flynismo]

sounds good, I'm going to run it right now. If no one hears from me by the morning, it probably means I chucked my computer out the window, lol..

[flynismo]

Oh, sorry this is probably a dumb question....if I end up getting a lot of errors, what then? Buy new RAM, or is there some way to fix it?

[gruven]

Once you have bad ram, the only thing to do is to find the offending stick and get rid of it. You can either replace it with a new stick, or just live without it. It may have a warranty though, as a lot of ram has a lifetime warranty now, or if it is in an OEM computer, most of them will replace it for free if it is within a year of purchase.

[Jonathan183]

Originally Posted by gruven

documentation is outdated and deprecated. Use the official handbook.

Originally Posted by gruven

Once you have bad ram, the only thing to do is to find the offending stick and get rid of it. You can either replace it with a new stick, or just live without it. It may have a warranty though, as a lot of ram has a lifetime warranty now, or if it is in an OEM computer, most of them will replace it for free if it is within a year of purchase.

Gruven thanks for correcting me on the live CD install, I agree a check of the hardware is probably a good idea.

You need to let memtest run a while, I'd give it 30 minutes, it can deliver bad news fast but never really tells you everything is OK. If you decide you want to give the whole system a check then you could try something like the ultimate boot CD.

Good luck with the testing and the install ... like gruven suggests check the warranty if you find bad RAM.

[gruven]

I would suggest letting memtest run for at least an hour, even overnight if possible. If you get no errors, your memory should be ok. If you do get errors, then you must find which stick or sticks are causing it.

I would suggest running one stick at a time for about an hour each. That should let you know which one is giving you problems. This is if the first test says you have errors.

[flynismo]

Well, I'm actually very, very surprised at this, but I let the test run overnight, and I got zero errors. I'm relieved, but surprised at that because I was convinced it was going bad because of how everything is running.

[gruven]

Now that is out of the way and we are pretty sure the ram is ok, we can move on to something else.

You said that you got one distro to boot completely. Let's look at that. What kernel are they using? Are they using any special patches? Why does their distro boot without problems?

Look around on their forums and ask some questions pertaining to that and try to figure out why it boots and others don't.

That is about the best I can think of unless you just want to try random distros with new kernels.