Failing PowerPC system...

[Jarod Wilson]

So... I have this old dual 800MHz PowerPC system (c. 2001 "QuickSilver" Power 
Mac G4), and its been sporadically locking up under Mac OS X lately, but to 
date, hasn't under Linux (though it doesn't get used under Linux as often). 
Well, tonight, I was going to use it for a PowerPC kernel build, but before 
doing that, fired up a yum upgrade, which led to a disturbind discovery... 3 
of the 25 or so packages to be upgraded hit cpio errors unpacking files from 
the rpms, claiming md5sum mis-matches.

This, coupled with the lock-ups under OS X led me to try another experiment... 
And wouldn't you know it, a repeated sha1sum on the same file only gets the 
correct result roughly 90% of the time. To make it more interesting, I've 
seen some of the incorrect sha1sums pop up more than once. I'm assuming I've 
got some hardware failing here.

So anyone have suggestions for diagnosing exactly what component is starting 
to fail? My first thought was cpu, then motherboard, and now memory... I 
figure memory is probably the easiest place to start poking, but is there a 
memtest86 equivalent for PowerPC? If not, I guess its memory stick roulette, 
and on to other hardware from there. Open to any and all suggestions...

-- 
Jarod Wilson
jwilson at redhat.com