Quote Originally Posted by Elisha8685
Hey, I bought the CD online to repair everything. Anyways, I tried running memtest, it starts the memory testing for about 3 minutes and then the whole computer shuts off in the middle of the process. I am completely confused. What kind of memtest failure would cause it to do that on me? Well thanks so far for the help.
Well, I have very little faith in a purchased Knoppix CD. They are almost always burnt at high speed (a well known source of Knoppix boot problems) and on poor quality media by someone just looking to make a fast buck off other's work.

But the memtest failure is pretty curious. I'm mot sure what it is telling us. You might want to research memtest86 a bit and see if you can come up with any answers. These are my guesses, in order of how likely I think they are:

  • 1. There is something very wrong with the hardware beyond memory. Could be the CPU itself. Could be the power supply. Could be any of the support chips or even the circuit board.

    2. I could still be a memory issue. Memtest86 tries to catch this, but since the program has to run in memory it could have missed an intermittent failure. If there are two memory modules and the system will run on only one I would try running memtest again with one memory module at a time (or 2 at a time if there are 4 memory modules). Or if you can swap the memory out completely it would be worth the test before assuming that #1 above is the answer.

    3. Given my bias against purchased Knoppix CDs, I have to wonder if the disc is so bad that memtest86 is bad also. This actually seems pretty unlikely, but I wouldn't want to ignore the chance. You could download memtest86 from the Internet and make a floppy or CD yourself and try running memtest86 from that. If it fails the same way at least that narrows things down to 1 or 2 above (although it does not prove the rest of the Knoppix CD is good). If that second copy of memtest86 runs fine and the Knoppix CD still fails when runing memtest, then consider that my bias against purchased Knoppix CDs may be correct (I've seen problems with them on this website before).