[TriLUG] Fw: WinXP vs RH 7.2

[Brent Fox]

On Thursday 01 November 2001 08:00 am, Matt Jezorek wrote:
> He trashed  both OS'es hummm wonder if he used bugzilla =)

No, he didn't use Bugzilla.  Or rather, he refused to.  We sent a few emails 
back and forth and determined that he had a bad cd.  On VC4, the kernel was 
spewing all kinds of messages about bad sectors on the cdrom.  But he had the 
retail version, so I found the error to be strange.  Not that the production 
house doesn't make mistakes, but that seemed odd.

I have seen at least two other bugs similar to his (with retail cds), and 
both of them turned out to be hardware related.  One guy swapped his cdrom 
drive out, and the problem went away.  Another guy ran MemTest86 on his 
machine and found that he had bad ram.  Swapping the ram fixed the problem.

It seems that when cdrom drives fail, they start by behaving strangely...the 
don't just fail altogether.  Windows ran fine on the machine with bad ram, 
though.  It seems like the kernel is less tolerant of faulty ram than Windows 
(I don't know that for a fact, but it seems that way).

Anyway, I took a box set from work and did a full install on it to make sure 
the cd's were good.  I offered to send him a tested set of discs to make sure 
that bad media wasn't the problem, but he said that he wasn't interested in 
pursuing it any further.

His hardware is identical to my box at work, so there's no reason it 
shouldn't work.  He seemed like a nice guy, but he didn't care much about 
solving the problem.  

Brent