Purchased new RAM but PC not booting up properly after

kaimera

bought a stick o pc133 512SDRAM of Komplette on Saturday.

arrived today.

stuck it in the pc...moniter wouldn't come on...
I had accidently loosed the other stick o ram alreadi in.

went to work then.

Came home and tried again aroudn 10.30 tonight.

"Windows cannot boot. System 32/Drivers/pci.sys file corrupt or missing.
Please insert original boot disk and press "R" to repair file."

So I insert the boot disk...click boot from CD...then...nothing...just a blue screen with Windows Setup in the top left corner.

I take out the ram and the pc boots up fine.

Now I did notice that the bottom connector for the ram was loose and wasn't as toight to the RAM like the other one.

could this be casuing it or did I get a bad stick o ram? [hope not]

thing is the PC IS recognising there is 768MB ram in the machine so...a dunno

Samba

Very strong chance that it is a dodgy stick, sometimes ram can be faulty but will actually work temporarily and then cause errors.

Did you try it in the slot of Ram which is functioning properly?

Doubt its the slot, usually if they are bust, it's bust.

hussey

try memtest86 this will tell you if you have dodgy ram

Mountjoy Mugger

Originally posted by hussey
try memtest86 this will tell you if you have dodgy ram

If he can't boot up, memtest will be shag all good to him. My advice would be to get on to Komplett and get an RMA.

Quigs Snr

If he can't boot up, memtest will be shag all good to him


Incorrect. memtest runs off it's own OS (Sort of), it is self booting and platform independant, thats why you have to put it on a floppy and cannot install direct to hard disk. As long as the machine goes through a bootstrap sequence and can attempt to boot from floppy which would appear to be the case here then memtest will work fine.

Get memtest. If it fails your stick is faulty.

Saruman

What OS is it and are you sure your mobo can support a 512mb stick?

Also is everything fine if you take it out and leave the old mem in? Also have you tried it in a mates computer?

kaimera

Quigs...my floppy is on the blink aswell...[see other thread on Tech]

ya, I'm sure it'll take 512MB...max is 1 or 2 Gigs.
OS is XP home edition.

When I take out the new 512 stick...the PC boots up fine.

kaimera

ffs...I switched the two sticks and lo n behold...I fried the 256 stick in the other slot.

The 512 stick workx grand in the other slot tho.

ffs...dodgy slots and I have no idea what could have happened cos I haven't touched the RAM before.

*sighs*

Saruman

Hard luck Kaimera!! 512 is better than 256 though.. thats the bright side.

kaimera

768 is better than 512 aswell
*sighs*

thems the breaks...

arse biscuits

leeroybrown

Give the new stick a good long Burn In test with Memtest86 or a similar tester anyway.

You're better off hammering the crap out of it for 6 hours or so rather than when you notice problems in future. One error and it's not working properly ... most resellers will accept that as a defacto RMA.

Samba

hehe, you should have just tried it ono! I have pi185 mobo, did the same except I managed to fry i stick and two slots, you got away lightly imo

kaimera

yaa...I'm just d/ling memtester 3.0 the cd bootable version.

gonna test it out tonight or 2m prolly.

SouperComputer

Just curious what borad you are running?

kaimera

MS-6534 mobo [microstar inc.]

kaimera

ran memtest last night and this afternoon for about 2 hours or so.

the new stick appears to be working grand. no faults reported on the all test scan

SouperComputer

well some good came out of it at least