Forum Overview :: American McGee's Honda Civic :: 0xDEADBEEF

[quote name="corax"][quote name="Fullofkittens"]That memory at 0x00000000 could not be "read" error also can be a precursor to HD failure[/quote] But it almost always isn't. This error is simply the result of a program attempting to dereferene a null pointer: [quote name="<a href='http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Null_pointer#The_null_pointer'>Wikipedia</a>"]In computer science, a pointer is a programming language datatype whose value refers directly to ("points to") another value stored elsewhere in the computer memory using its address. Obtaining the value that a pointer refers to is called dereferencing the pointer. . . . A null pointer has a reserved value, often but not necessarily the value zero, indicating that it refers to no object. Null pointers are used routinely, particularly in C and C++, to represent exceptional conditions. . . Because it refers to nothing, an attempt to dereference a null pointer causes a run-time error that usually terminates the program immediately (in the case of C, often with a segmentation fault, since the address literally corresponding to the null pointer will likely not be allocated to the running program).[/quote]In C based languages (such as the ones used to write MS Windows) null always equals zero. When a Windows program tries to dereference a null pointer, the operating system sees the program trying to access memory at location zero (0x00000000) and throws an error. It's possible that a bad hard disk could cause this kind of error by mangling your data, but it's far more likely the result of a simple programming mistake.[/quote]