Caltrops - American McGee's Honda Civic

Forum Overview :: American McGee's Honda Civic

by corax 05/18/2006, 11:29pm PDT

Fullofkittens wrote:

That memory at 0x00000000 could not be "read" error also can be a precursor to HD failure

But it almost always isn't. This error is simply the result of a program attempting to dereferene a null pointer:

Wikipedia wrote:

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).

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.