452: Out of range pointer error

For the last couple weeks, my computer has been up and down, spitting out an error when booting up:

452: out of range pointer: 0x100010
Backgrace (.text 0xa058 .data 0x15a6c):
Aborted. Press any key to exit.

It started happening after rebooting following an update. Internet searches I did brought up some older forum posts that pointed to grub being the cause. Since it had been several Fedora versions (before Fedora 30 I think) since I last reinstalled and the system was feeling a bit crusty, I figured I’d just start fresh with a new install.

Wrestled with getting a Fedora 37 live image to boot off, did a reinstall and updates, rebooted, and ended up with the same message. Did this a couple times and started investigating the hardware.

Several iterations of testing the DDR3 memory modules and pulling out hard drives, I managed to get my computer back up and running with 8GB less memory, two 500 GB drives and a 250 GB SSD (the original boot drive) removed. All of the memory tested fine individually but with all of them installed, memtest consistently gave errors when performing one test the 21-22 GB range. Not sure if something’s happened to one of the memory slots, but the system stayed pretty stable for a few days.

Then, after reinstalling some software, running some updates, and rebooting, the error came back.

Ugh.

At this point, rather than reinstall again, I tried reinstalling the bootloader and rebuilt the grub config file. Rebooted and the system came back up without any issues.

Still don’t know what caused the breakage, but it’s been pretty stable so far the past few days. Let’s hope it stays that way. It’s running a bit slower because now I’m back to booting off a regular hard drive (1 TB) rather than an SSD. At some point I might try to put the other 8 GB back in to see how stable the system stays. I’d been having some problems with the computer intermittently freezing up at random points, so I’ll just leave it like this for a while. The 500 GB drives will go into a couple other systems that I inherited a while back. I think one of them will be put to work in the garage, probably on the CNC mill. The other one might end up being used with the radio in the shack.

I tried to reinstall Fedora on the 250 GB SSD drive, but the install would always freeze in the middle of doing something. Even though the drive’s SMART status shows it’s fine, I suspect it has started to develop some issues somewhere.