Corruption or Bad Memory (?) PLEASE HELP

hey guys, im getting some weird problems with my comp that i built about 2 months ago. (see sig for specs) I think it maybe ram...but the ram passes memtest for 13.5 hours (all tests) with NO ERRORS. and its running at 250 (stock) with 3-4-4-8 and all other settings set to auto. cpu is running at 306x9=2754. (using mem divider obviously)

Im pretty sure I corrupted some stuff when I OC'd the mem earlier. so i re-installed windows on one of my drives that i have partitioned off.. (300gb maxtor divided into several drives) and did all the fresh install stuff. For some reason, if I do not keep the windows install disk in the drive, and keep the cd rom ahead of the hard drive in the boot priority list, then i get a "boot disk failure" error. really strange..cause when cd is in...(I dont boot to cd, I just leave it in drive..) it boots into XP fine..no problems..

Another issue is that sometimes when downloading small apps or utilities..when installing with the setup wizard, it will just crap out on me..saying something bout the setup files being corrupted..and I should re-download. (which doesn't help if I do)

another error is I get weird visual corruption sometimes on pics in IE. (see attached pic)

here is pic of other error...

Almost sounds as if the HDD is bad. memtest is not the end all, however. I had a pair of OCZ plats that passed memtest for 10+ hours. Still had BSODs. Took them to work and threw them on the testbeds there and they failed. Work uses a much better program than even memtest. RMA'd them and got a replacement pair.

Sounds like the MBR is corrupted to me. You need to fix the mbr I think- go into the windows setup and choose to fix your installation and you type something like "fix mbr" in the command line. I'm not sure the eaxact command, but its something like that.

If you are testing memory with memtest only run test 5 or 8. Rest of the tests is just waste of time and your 13.5h of memetest probably would equal to 2-3 hours of memtest #5.


Download some prime95 and installed it in two directories and run two instances of it at the same time.

Try going to non overclocked settings and see if you getting same errors as when overclocked.

well I fixed the boot error. it appears that my ide drive got set to C: when i Installed windows..and i was booting off my sata, on drive D: I reinstalled windows after i disconnected my IDE drive..everything is good to go..

I am still however having the weird mem problems it would seem. while trying to download the nivida drivers..the setup file got corrupted. also I am still having that graphical error (as seen above) occasionally.

Prime 95 runs fine with 2 instances open for >24hrs. no errors. I will try memtest again with only test #5 and see what happens. It would seem I might need to RMA my G.Skill.... there's no time limit on rma from newegg is there? since they got lifetime guarentee... [thanks for all the help guys]

well I did memtest on test #5 for 19 hours. it passed 532 times. hmm...

I suddenly have a sneaking suspicion that maybe its not the ram. I think im going to run prime 95 again...and double check the cpu overclock..

well here is the results of the prime.. let me know what u guys think.. Im not sure how exactly this happened, but i guess one of the prime windows stopped responding..