On board Parity Error

Smithers

lo all ,

just started getting this message booting up ,

On board parity Error

Addr (hex) = (A000:0002)
System Halted! Must power down


old p166 machine with win 98 on it ,

Anyone got any ideas?

Loaded nothing previous , happened outta the blue

Smithers

ColinM

Me again!
Well, is this a BIOS error message? (did windows start to load?) Does your computer's motherboard have onboard video (no separate video card)? It sounds like if you do then the video memory may be bad. The memory may be soldered on to the board or it may be removable. The memory will look like about the size of SODIMM notebook ram if it is removable. If it is removable, try taking it out (carefully) as an experiment and see what happens when you power up again. See if the error message changes at all.
If you can get a pci video card (I doubt your machine has an AGP slot) and plug it into a spare PCI slot, this might disable the onboard video and this would probably get around the situation. If you do put in a card and you can get into the bios setup, check to see if there is an option for disabling the onboard video subsystem.
What is the make and model number of your motherboard?

Smithers

reseated vid card and no good ,

changed pci slot and also found something that resembled laptop memory , reseated it ,

hey presto it worked,

Colin the magician!!