Problems on new server

[Arkaine23]

My company just got a 2U dual 242 server with 8GB of ram. However, we're having some trouble. It's runing SUSE 9 enterprise edition (64 bit), but it hangs randomly even when not loaded. Sometimes during the post it hangs while checking memory- at a random point during the check (sometimes 500mb, sometimes 2000mb, etc). We've swapped out ramsticks (an expensive bit of trouble-shooting let me assure you. And the problem continues just as before.

So we beleive it may be the motherboard (this thing came pre-built, so I don't even know what the motherboard is...)

Anyway, does anyone know if memtest or memtest86 can run effectively on a dual opteron with 8GB of ram? Or does anyone have any advice for me besides swapping the motherboard or rma'ing?

[Ian Cody]

On the Memtest website, they say v 3.0 supports over 2gb of memory, they only tested up to 6 gigs tho. Probably should run memtest before an RMA, not sure which would be faster tho...

[cmcquistion]

Have you tried the new version of Memtest? (Memtest+)

They just put a new version, this month.

http://www.memtest.org/

[Arkaine23]

I think I may have fixed it by disabling bank interleaving.

[OC-NightHawk]

I'm going to assume the machine has a warenty. With that in mind I personaly would save my man power for other things and have the company you bought it from fix it.

Have you checked if its overheating?

[Arkaine23]

They already replaced all 8 sticks of ram for us.

CPU's are at 36C-40C. It's parked in a cubicle with the top of the case open....

[OC-NightHawk]

oh my its hanging with the case open. Maybe the bios chip is bad. Its also possible that the motherboard is bad like you deduced. Do you have a spare bios chip sitting around?

[Arkaine23]

No spare bios chip. Problem sould be either hardware or software now that I've got it booting up fine. It posts fine now and makes it through the inital memory check everytime. But its still unstable when we run jobs on it. Now we can move on to trouble-shooting the OS I think. We could also give tyan's beta bios a try.

FYI- the board is a K8S pro

[new_novice]

wish you the best Ark, I hope the company won't ditch AMD just because of that. One other thing, Did you try to run it from your CD, to test to see if the Software is the problem or the OS, if your Knoppix can even run 64 bits.

V

[Arkaine23]

I have not tried booting knoppix yet, and it's 32 bit but should run on 64 bit hardware.

No one has really asked me to try and fix this server (I'm just a temporary jr. admin at this point). But I know they want to get it working very badly.

I'm passing the link for the memtest and bios to the guy who bought the box (a more senior admin than myself). I'm also going to suggest memtesting with just 2GB at a time to see if we can find any trouble.