EEk... bad memory? weird stuff...

[Jaguar]

Here’s one to tax the brains… a customer left me in his PC for a (seemingly) quick memory upgrade.
A quick run over the spec.. P4 2.8Ghz running Windows XP Pro SP2 with 512Mb ram (2 x Elpida PC3200 256 DDR ram) in 2 slots on a 4 slot dual channel asrock board. Geforce FX5500 256Mb graphics, 160Gb hard drive, lite-on 16X dual layer DVD/RW and a standard Pioneer 12X DVD ROM.

So, he had bought another 2 X PC3200 chips from eBay (this time Micron ones) and asked me to fit them.. “ok” says me, I suppose as they are matched pairs it should be ok, drop it round and I’ll stick them in… “Only take a few minutes” Famous last words….. (I now take it matched pairs means all the same make)

I was unsure if mixing memory was a good idea, but as there were 4 slots, I assumed that would not be a problem. Anyway I plugged the memory in and switched on.

No nasty beeps, and the BIOS quite happily displayed the 4 chips as 1 gig of ram via 4 x 256 DDR400 as we hoped..

“great” that’s that, stick the lid on and…………………

BSOD.

Oh?

That’s odd…

To cut a long story short, after 3 “restarts” windows then refused to boot.

After removing the new memory, a restart proved impossible, it would not even run in safe mode.. In fact, I actually had to format the thing and re-install with just the original memory, as after 2 hours of trying, it seemed that no recovery options would work at all! It even at one point refused to read the XP cd-rom (telling us it was faulty)

So, we have come to the conclusion that the new memory is faulty, but we are baffled as to why it took the hard drive down with it… and are even beginning to think that maybe something else was to blame.. Has anybody else come across this?

 

[muckshifter]

Yep, thats a classic ...

Not all MB can use ALL the slots ... did you check? I would not trust an Asrock MB. If it can, the all 4 sticks should be from the same batch.

This would have been "the one time" I would recommend the use of the "reset CMOS/BIOS" jumper.

 

[Techy]

You sure it would boot before you installed the addition RAM???

 

[Jaguar]

oh yes, it booted fine, everything was working 100% before I put the new chips in, as I mentioned this should have been a simple upgrade, and thats the first time in 20 years a simple memory upgrade has went sideways for me...

mucks, I have had no problems with the more recent asrock boards, and have used them with no bother in around 25 new builds this year (ok, they were all mostly these ones

http://www.asrockamerica.com/Products/775V88.htm

) and I use one myself with no trouble... and the bios reset did not help nor did threatning it with instant death, anyway, it's "after the fact" now as I sent him on his way with 2 chips from my machine, and I'll get the other 2 replaced for something else.

 

[Jaguar]

Well... cut a long story short, I found out that one of the "new" chips was indeed faulty..

Problem solved...

except, we still don't know why we had to re-format.... ah well... such is the life of a PC technician....