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Welcome to Panela, Matt Harrison's take on mostly Open Source, Linux, Python, innovation in those areas, other buzzwords and Dick Proenneke. It comes complete with the illustrations as needed. Note the opinions expressed here are merely my opinions and not the opinions of my employer.
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Bad memory? Ubuntu (memtest86) to the rescue...
Commercial interlude. (No I don't work for Ubuntu.) It is cool that Ubuntu sent me 5 cds for free. And stickers as well. (Though my laptop running ubuntu still has some issues). So use Ubuntu if you aren't willing to run Gentoo)
Back to our (ir-)regularly scheduled program.
Turns out the memory error was at 422.7M (of a 512M module). Good, if it were in the first couple of megs things might be a little more complicated. But I'm happy the error is towards the end of my memory (chances are 50% that it will be). So I added mem=420 to my grub options and I'm happily running now (error free, albeit with 20% less memory). But at least now I can boot to a stable environment if I want to install the badram kernel patches and make my kernel ignore only the bad bits of ram. (Sure wish that patch was included in the gentoo-kernel....)
Funny weird. I ran memtest while installing Ubuntu's Dapper Drake a few
days ago and it was reporting vast amounts of my 512Megs of memory bad. I
wasn't sure if to fault the memtest of my mem chips, I went with the
former.
Interesting. Either the badmem or badram patches website had a similar
story. They had a bad piece of memory, ran memtest and somehow the memory
fixed itself.... Isn't hardware fun? Nothing like those
non-deterministic errors!
Generally speaking, gentoo-sources only carries a very lightweight list of
patches and stuff added on by Gentoo devs. Anything experimental usually
isn't in the tree. There's always mm-sources though, that might have it.
Two days?! Is that normal? I was recently troubleshooting a mem issue,
found this program and let it run for 3 hours, then decided the RAM was
probably good. Maybe I should crank at it again.
SMG-
It ran for 58 hours and found 20 errors. The same test failed on different
passes. If you are having hardware issues, I would probably run it
overnight...
This may also help:
Thanks for the advice: a Mythbuntu box I just built from old parts had
flashing caps/scroll and your solution targeted the problem (and its
solution) right away.