Re: how can a bit be off in memory?

Charles T. Smith wrote:
On Sat, 30 Jun 2007 14:54:35 +0100, The Natural Philosopher wrote:

Charles T. Smith wrote:

All software is just 'bits in hardware'..any chance of identifying WHAT
the actual difference was, or have you simply overwritten the corrupt
copy?
:) Yeah, that's the thing. I didn't need to overwrite it. I rebooted.
After that, the file in /bin/vim matched the file I downloaded from
suse.


Ah. The plot thickens.

So the image on disk was fine, but the image as READ by the system was
corrupt, until you rebooted.

Actually, I guess I'll buy the arguments of the ECC (EMA?) posters that
it shows why ECC is a good thing.
I don't. I am fairly certain you had a corrupt transfer off the disk.

In my experience, that is almost certainly another device on the IO bus
that woke up when it shouldn't as some PARTICULAR address passed it by..


Hmmm. Could it be that my disks don't use DMA?



Be surprised if they didn't..Ive been looking some stuff up..early non wide SCSI disks use 8 bit transfers as did early IDE disks..also a duff 8 bit device like a floppy daisy chained on an IDE cable could easily be the source of this.
.

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