Complete Crash - Cannot Boot from HDD or CDROM

[tommy_fila]

I've run into some serious problems. Everything was working fine yesterday when all of a sudden my system froze, and for some odd reason the "Caps Lock" and "Scroll Lock" lights on my keyboard began flashing (does that mean anything?). I didn't think too much of it and because the computer was completely unresponsive, I had to turn it off. When I turned it back on it began starting, but when it gets to "Booting kernel..." it automatically restarts. I don't get any sort of error message. I figured I'd try and boot from the LiveCD and try to check things out, but that also doesn't work anymore. I get to the stage where the LiveCD says "Booting kernel..." and the screen just goes blank and the system hangs.

Basically, I can't do anything at the moment. Is there any possible explanation for this behavior other than that my motherboard or some other hardware is broken? Is there anything I can do with my system when even the LiveCD wont boot?

Any help or suggestions on how I should proceed would be greatly appreciated.
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"What goes on in life, that goes for eternity."

[frostschutz]

[tommy_fila]

I'm not sure how I would be able to test the hardware piece by piece since this is the only computer I have available.

I'll try and see if I can get memtest86 up and running and see what it gives me.

I tried booting a WinXP CD just to see if that might work, and I get the following error message after it says "Booting CD..."

"SETUPLDR: Couldn't open drive multi(0+disk(0)cdrom(13?)"

I have two CDROM drives and I get the same error message for both of them. I doubt that both of them broke at the same time, so could this be a problem with the motherboard?
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"What goes on in life, that goes for eternity."

[tommy_fila]

So I tried running memtest86, but it fails right in the middle of Test #2 with the message "Unexpected Interrupt - Halting". It doesn't really produce an error report, but from what I can tell it seems like it detected 3 errors before it fails.

Is this a pretty good sign that the memory is indeed broken? Also, I ran the disk check utility in the boot menu and it says that my slave drive failed the test with Error Code 7. This is clearly a separate issue since the drive is not used for booting (I also disconnected it just to make sure it had no influence on things). The reason why I'm mentioning this is because I'm starting to wonder what happened to my computer. It seems like a whole bunch of different things all broke at once. How can something like this happen?

Thanks for the help and ideas so far.
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"What goes on in life, that goes for eternity."

[frostschutz]

You can also start by throwing out everything that is not absolutely required for the system to work (for example if you have two ram modules, put in only one or the other), remove extension cards, drives, peripherals, etc. unexpected interrupt is bad, but not necessarily caused by bad ram, can also be something with the bios or some other device acting up. if memtest actually gives you memory errors, chances are that either ram, mobo, cpu or psu are broken... unfortunately it's extremely hard to pinpoint hardware faults

[tommy_fila]

All right, there is some progress. I started playing around with the ram modules and it turns out one of them is defective. After I removed it, memtest86 ran fine and now I can boot the LiveCD.

However, if I try to boot just from the HDD I still have the same behavior as described pervisouly. I get a message saying "Booting kernel..." and then the system automatically restarts. Any idea what that might be? Should I try re-installing grub from the LiveCD?
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"What goes on in life, that goes for eternity."

[frostschutz]

With bad memory, all sorts of bad data may have ended up on your disk. Maybe the hdd kernel image is corrupt. If booting from a Live CD works, and you're confident that your ram and disks are fine, run a (forced) file system check on all your filesystems, then mount & chroot, and make a clean reinstall of grub and kernel.

[tommy_fila]

So far so good. My system is back up and running. It seems like it was really all due that bad memory module.

I'm still a little unsure about what to do with my slave HDD that did not pass the disk check. I haven't had the chance to hook it up again, but I'm wondering even if it will work again, should I trust the drive? Is it possible that the disk check came up negative because of the bad memory module?

Thank you very much for your help. Without you giving me the idea to check the memory modules, I would have probably ended up having to buy a new computer.
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"What goes on in life, that goes for eternity."

[frostschutz]

Well, you'd have to hook it up again, in order to look at its smart values, and/or run a self test on it. Make a backup of all your data in any case, it's important to always have a backup.

[monsm]