[Chester LUG] de-lurking - a desperate question!

[Tim White]

Hi all

Don't know if you
remember me – I came to a few meetings right at the start of the
group, but then moved to Manchester 2 or 3 years ago and have
followed you all as a lurker since then. Anyway, I was wondering if
the Chester hive mind can offer any advice on a problem which is
doing my head in at the moment... Apologies for the long story.

I have a desktop PC,
about 7/8 years old, Athlon processor, Radeon graphics card, which
has happily run Linux for years starting with PCLinuxOS and then
Debian 5 and 6 stable. In the past 2 or 3 months it got a bit flaky
and would not update to the latest (Deb stable) kernel either through
Synaptic or apt-get. Then last week it wouldn't boot at all and
reported segfaults at boot.

So I tried to:
Re-install a
Clonezilla system backup (from before the errors started happening) 
Install a newly
downloaded Deb 6 CD
Re- install from my
previous Deb 5 and 6 CDs, which I know ran OK
Install other linuxes
– SUSE, Fedora CDs
Run live CDs – Suse,
PCLinuxOS, probably others.
They all fail, either
in the install or on first boot. Usually the error message is about a
segfault, sometimes about a corrupt install but I suspect that is a
false message. So, I think a hardware problem. 

BUT I can run Puppy
from a USB stick which loads into RAM. I have tried changing the HD
(SATA and IDE) and CD drives, no difference, and run memtest, all OK.
I don't understand. Why can I run from USB / RAM, but not hard disk
or CD? Of course, I'm trying to avoid the conclusion that the thing
is terminally broken. I can't afford a new one, I've just bought a
new bike! Does anyone have any suggestions?

Cheers

Tim
 
==
All General Statements Are False
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