Hardware Failure Troubleshooting

I am having possible hardware failure problem(s) with one of my PC's which is about 4 years old. I use the PC for installing various Linux Distros when new ones are released.

A couple of months ago I started getting an error during the copy to hard drive installation step. The error message said something about my DVD-RW drive having problems (It was suggested to clean the lens.) or the hard drive is having problems. At the time I concluded that the problem was the ~6 year old internal DVD-RW drive and replaced the drive with a new internal DVD-RW drive. The problem went away until a couple of days ago when I started getting basically the same error messages and a few times I get application crashes when the CD/DVD is booting to the Live Desktop.

I decided to boot the installation DVD from an External USB 2.0 DVD-RW drive. The same problem occurred during the installation attempt. I am in the process of doing a Full Diagnostics Test (including surface scan) of the Western Digital hard drive with the bootable Western Digital's Diagnostics CD.

I burned the Linux Distro CD's/DVD's on another PC. I always verify the MD5Sum after the ISO download, and I always verify the burned media after the burn step (IMGBurn). I use good quality CD's/DVD's (Verbatim).

Does anyone have any comments on what should be the next troubleshooting steps?

Thanks in Advance.

 

Also check the if DVD-RW drive cable is well connected.

 

Both the SATA Data and SATA Power Connectors are properly connected.

 

did you check event viewer logs for any further clues?

 

The PC with the DVD-RW read errors is not on a Windows PC and the Linux OS is currently damaged due to an incomplete install.

 

It looks like my hardware problem is "Memory Failure". See here:

https://www.wilderssecurity.com/showthread.php?t=312005

 

I had forgotten that someone who had upgraded their PC about a year ago gave me two 1GB sticks of Memory which he reported as good. I looked at the Memory and it is Crucial DDR2 which is what my motherboard uses.

I switched out the bad Corsiar Memory, installed the Crucial Memory, followed by a Memory Test which showed no errors. I just successfully installed and updated Ubuntu 11.10 with no errors.

I plan to return the Memory to Corsair for a replacement under the Warranty.