[plug] Intermittent hardware problem

[Jim Householder]

Hi

One of my machines has a problem.  2.6Ghz Celeron, MSI all-in-one M/B, 256MB ram, new hdd.  hdd was purchased yesterday, the rest last March.  CDRW is 4 years old and DVD reader is 3 months old.  Cables and power supply are 4 years old.

Over the last month or so it has been spontaneously rebooting from time to time.  Now as likely as not on reboot it hangs after displaying the PCI device listing and before the "Verify DMI pool data..." message.  A reboot at this point ususally works.

Something is corrupting/replacing files.  No errors are displayed.  Yesterday I installed Windows XP Home and Mandrake 10.1 Official on the new hard disk, and things worked ok.  A reboot to XP later resulted in scandisk running and fragments of files found.  This morning I booted linux and firefox would not start.  Said libssl3.so had a bad ELF header.  On checking, it had totally different data.  Same size etc.  No idea what the original inode was so I could not check that.

I ran memtest-86 for 1.5 hours, 11 passes of standard test, and no errors were reported.

I initally thought it was a disk problem as there was a lot of file corruption.  XP Home was used exclusively and VET reported no viruses.  sfc -purgecache fixed the problems in some cases.  I replace the drive but problems continue.  Thinking back, if it had been the drive there should have been at least a lot of retries.

Where do I look next?

TIA
Jim