Memtest error-o-rama

[BouncingSoul]

Hey all

My roommates (new) pc stopped booting one day after a lightning storm. Everything else in the house works fine, the power was only off for a second but it seems to have screwed his system something fierce. At first it would say "Missing necessary system file boot failed" or something to that effect. I ended up reformatting, reinstalling and running scan disk. Everything was working fine but now he gets random reboots and such which immediately suggests bad ram. I've been running Memtest86 for the last 3 hours and I can't tell what its doing. Thus far its got a series of columns with various info like memory address and stuff, what worries me is the column for passes says 10 (I dont know how many to run) and next to that it says Errors 43000 and it goes up every second it runs. I'm assuming his RAM is just toast with that many errors but, since I've never really worked with this before I'm not sure what I'm reading here. If anyone has an idea what a good range of errors is it will get me started on the next steps.

Thanks.

 

[Steevo]

Ya, toasted memory, or I have also seen a trashed northbridge do the same.


Pull the memory and test it in another system.

 

[Son Goku]

Lightning strikes are bad with any kind of electronic equipment. Did the power just bump, or was there an actual lightning strike? Was it attached through a surge protector?

Even with a surge protector, if one gets a hit... Back when I lived in New Jersey, we had a tree who laid it's roots down towards the ground for the house. The tree got struck by lightning, which travelled down to the root, made it's way to the ground of the house, and travelled into the basement where we had a TV, stereo, and some other stuff hooked through a surge supressor.

Lets just say the surge supressor had jumped clear accross the cellar (yes it was unplugged), and the switch popped outa the thing and flew off to the side. The TV was fine, but the amp on the stereo was toast... That was the good news though. The firemen said, if the lightning had travelled elsewhere, the house might have caught fire...

Depending what happened, you're roomate could have some real problems. Do you have any spare RAM you can test in his mobo to see if that helps remedy the prob?

 

[BouncingSoul]

He's got two sticks in there so I'll mix and match until I determine which one (or both) is f*cked and go from there. The weird thing is we both have PC's in the house, both on the same type of generic 6 plug power strip with surge protector yet mine is working fine but his is not.

 

[Son Goku]

It happens. It's the same that happened when we got a lightning strike (albeit not sure if you had a strike or just a brown/blackout). It depends the path the electricity choses to follow...

Mind you the TV and the stereo were plugged into the same surge protector. Yet one got burned out, and the other was fine...

 

[VenomXt]

thats alot of errors for a stick that still boots.

 

[BouncingSoul]

Ran 6 more passes on one random stick and it was error free. Looks like he'll have to get by on 512 until he can order a new stick.