That's a good thought, but I know that Jonimus had upgraded to Windows 7 quite some time ago, so I figured that was probably not the issue.

Good news: Well I got my Mobo back from ASUS and they did indeed send me a new one.
Bad news: It doesn't seem like the Mobo was the issue because I'm still getting crashes, even with Live CD's so I know its not the Windows or Linux install that is the issue.

I've run a short SMART test on my main HDD and it came back fine so I am trying a Long test to see if anything turns up, I also have some different ram chips I can try but the ones I'm currently using passed memtest no problem so I don't see how that could be the issue. I am really out of ideas here.

How long did you memtest for? How many passes?

Try leaving memtest running for 24 hours

I got through 3 or 4 passes IIRC.

Also the Kernel Debug output is saying something about I/O errors so I almost wonder if it somhow could be the Processor, but that seems unlikely to me.

Could still be the hard drive, actually. S.M.A.R.T. is fairly useless. Do you have a spare hard drive you can try?

But do consider doing a 24 hour memtest. A 3 or 4 hour test isn't considered very conclusive.

It was 3 or 4 passes, not 3 to 4 hours, and the issues still occur when in live environments so it doesn't seem like it would be the HDD, then again each of those times I have mounted that drive, so maybe the drive has a firmware bug that is causing it to send bad data.

Disconnect the hard drive and boot the live CD. Mess around for an hour or two and see what happens.

Ok I'l try that and see what happens. If it still crashes I'll try running memtest overnight and go from there.

So it sounds like at this point you think it actually might indeed be the HDD(s)?

Well, that or the RAM, I'm going to run memtest all night and see what it says, if that fails I'll try backing up, repartitioning, and reformating the drive that appears to be causing the issue.

Well I have let Memtest86+ v4.00 run overnight and it is on pass 19 after 16hrs with 0 errors.
That leads me to believe that it must be something corrupted on my main HDD as to whether it is actual disk failure or corruption in the partition table or just both my NTFS and ext4 file systems getting messed up.
I'll start working on backing things up tonight and then start reinstalling Arch and Win 7 tomorrow.

It could be a drive controller going out too, try a different drive channel, or switch to sata/ide, if you can.

Brand new Mobo I sent the old one thinking that was the issue and then sent me the new one no questions asked.


Edit: Just for grins since I've been running memtest I decided to OC my CPU to 3.6Ghz like I had it before I started having issues and memtest completed its first pass in 1/2 the time! Who would have thought a 600Mhz boost in clock speed would make such a huge difference.

You also OC'd your RAM quite a bit, that is why memtest started going faster. OCing your RAM that much could have quite an impact on stability, so use a larger divider if you want to stay at 3.6ghz (or do a *full* 24 hours of memtest followed by a *full* 24 hours of prime95 if you intend to run at those speeds). Don't OC until you fix your current problem, though

Actually I left the ram at 800mhz the only bios setting I touched was the FSB and making sure the RAM stayed at 800Mhz. I'll of course disable the OC when I do the reformat and install.

The speed of the RAM is tied to the FSB. Setting it to 800mhz in the BIOS set the multiplier at 2x. 200mhz FSB * 2 = 400mhz, or 800mhz DDR (DDR2 800 is actually 400mhz, multiply by 2 for DDR speed). With me so far? When you bumped up your FSB, you in turn bumped up the speed of the RAM. To get your CPU to 3.6ghz from 3ghz you must have bumped the FSB to 240mhz, right? That would have set your RAM to 480mhz, or 960mhz DDR - quite the bump in speed.

It's been a while since I've OC'd a Core 2, so forgive me if some of the numbers are off, but you get the idea.

Actually I dropped the Ram Multiplier so it would stay at 800Mhz. I upped the FSB from 333Mhz to 400Mhz and then set the ram speed to 800Mhz.

How did you set the RAM speed? What did you set the multiplier to?

Because memtest uses basically 0 CPU whatsoever. The *only* way for it to speed up at all is for you to have OC'd the memory. It went nearly twice as fast because you OC'd the crap out of your RAM.

Indeed, I'd expect RAM latency to be far and away the limiting factor in memtest's ability to run fast. I'm equally curious what happened.

Latency makes no difference to memtest - it's all about the bandwidth for that.