[X4U] DRAM failure (was Hard drive or hard drive controller gone)

[Jim Robertson]

On 1/16/06 7:40 PM, "John Baltutis" <baltwo at san.rr.com> wrote:

> That's a pretty good price for DRAM and that's a pretty good machine. BTW,
> can't you return the bad ones? Most suppliers have lifetime guarantees on
> those
> modules.

The $75 price was from the Chip Merchant. It's more like $100 from crucial.
My problem is that my son's MDD G4 may no longer be "a pretty good machine."
One hard drive has failed, one DIMM slot may have failed, and two DRAM
modules seem to have failed in fairly short order. Also, neither of the 512
MB sticks were purchased from top-tier sources, so I doubt I'd be able to
return either for credit.

Curiously, when the machine contains ONLY the 256 MB DRAM stick from Apple
and it runs memtest in single user mode, it's happy to do so for hours on
end, but even with that module living alone in the box, running Mac OS X
10.4.4 it will freeze up within a few hours.

I'm now running (or sitting) with the machine booted from the Tiger
installer DVD-Rom doing nothing. Disk Utility doesn't find anything wrong
with the new Seagate 300 GB drive's volume, permissions repair just fine.
I'm running out of ideas to sort out what's wrong.

> I don't understand the "can't use" bit with the 300 GB HD. Put it into
> something like the Argosy USB/FW enclosure ($38 + S&H) and it should work with
> any of your machines.

Now THAT's a great idea. Struggling with this the past several days has
rekindled my notion that there cannot be too many backups, and what I do now
for my dual 1.8 GHz G5 is backup to another SATA drive inside the same box.
Backing up to an external drive as well sounds like a smart idea.

Jim Robertson
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