Can't boot!

[Patrick O'Callaghan]

On Wed, 2009-05-13 at 21:25 -0400, William M. Quarles wrote:
> S P Arif Sahari Wibowo wrote:
> > On Wed, 13 May 2009, William M. Quarles wrote:
> >> The computer seems to "die" right about when X is about to start.
> > 
> > Can you try <ctrl><alt><F1> (and F2, F3, ...) to see of console login is 
> > on?
> > 
> OK, this PC is playing mean tricks on me. The past 10 times I've tried 
> to boot it, the boot has failed, and also, the keyboard stops responding 
> (so <Ctrl><Alt><anything> doesn't work). This thing is behaving very 
> inconsistently, because it just did a successful boot and I was able to 
> log in.

I'd say do a thorough memory check. The brief check done by a BIOS at
boot time is not exhaustive enough and sporadic memory errors can cause
all kinds of random woe. I recently pulled two 1GB sticks from my
machine because memtest86+ found problems (actually I think the problems
are with the motherboard slots rather the chips, but it amounts to the
same thing). The machine lost half its RAM but now it works flawlessly.

http://www.memtest.org

poc