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From: mvale…@draco.lnec.pt ()
Subject: * HELP: Weirdest memory problem ever !!
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Sender: n…@math.fu-berlin.de (Math Department)
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Organization: LNEC, Lab. Nac. de Eng. Civil, Lisboa, Portugal
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Date: Thu, 24 Feb 1994 12:15:05 GMT
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Hi:
This must be the craziest problem ever to happen to me in
12 years of computers. I hope someone can help…
I have a 386 running at 25Mhz. This is installed in a
MB with AMI BIOS ( a very old one, from 91, I think; all the
menus in the SETUP program are in B&W and the initial menu
just has EXIT/STANDARD CMOS/EXT. CMOS ). It also has the OPTI
chipset.
I have 8Mb memory ( the maximum that the MB will hold ) and
all the SIMMs ( 8 of them ) are 70ns.
My wife started having problems with Corel Draw and I gave
her my 486 motherboard ( nice guy that I am :-) and put the
386 MB in my computer. When running DOOM ( what else :-) the
computer locked up when loading the WAD file. I messed around
with the BIOS setup and got it to a point where instead of
locking up the DOS extender that DOOM uses would fail with a
page fault.
I also found out that the same lockups would occur when
running Fractal Painter under Windows.
Deciding that this was a memory problem I pulled out trusty
Checkit and checked memory.
Right enough, Checkit reported bad memory on section 7-8 meg.
Aha, I said, bad SIMM. NOT!: I substituted another SIMM from
the other computer and I got the same error. Aha!, bad SIMM
socket. BZZT, wrong again… I configured the PC to just use
4 Meg RAM and now the memory error reported by Checkit was
in the zone 3-4 Meg.
Can you believe this !?!? Anyone have the slightest idea of
what this might be ?
One other thing: by fiddling around with the BIOS setup,
sometimes Checkit would lockup or reboot the machine instead
of reporting errors.
What I’m thinking right now is that this must be some kind
of BIOS setup mistake ( though God know I’ve tried every
combination possible ) but its quite difficult to setup a
BIOS that old ( do you know what AT Stretch is ? )
Any hints/pointers/tips/info/help are welcome. I’m going
out of my mind.
Thanks in advance for your answer.
C U!
By(e)
Mario Valente
