Another interesting problem with one of my own systems…

I was cloning a hard drive (as part of a customer upgrade), and after 1 hour of waiting, I started to suspect that something was wrong…

After all, cloning about 35gb of data from a 80gb drive to a 320gb drive shouldn’t take that long.

I decide to start windows normally, just to look at the contents of the 80gb drive.

Well, windows get part way through the startup, and then I see the familiar blue screen of death.

I didn’t look at the actual numbers, but I know a blue screen is caused by either a change in software/drivers (not in this case), or a hardware failure.

Since the most recent change was adding the 2 hard drives, I figured unplugging them should do the trick… nope.

Ok, try memtest86: no memory fault.

Change video cards: no change.

I pull out all the pci cards, and any disks I can. but now it gets difficult to make the problem happen. The blue screen only happens while I’m trying to start from my hard drive.

I can get to the bios.

I can boot bartpe from the cd, and i can run a few system tests… all with no problem.

The system even starts in safe mode correctly…

I then decide to start pulling out the RAM sticks. (I have 3 sticks of 512Mb).

After pulling the first one out,the system started normally!

After some swapping, I found the RAM was not faulty, but a particular socket was to blame… I wonder why memtest86 didn’t detect a problem…

Another strange yet frustrating problem.