Just to contribute to all the horror stories... Everyone remember how SIMMs had to be put in the motherboard in pairs? Ever wonder, just for the heck of it, what would happen if you didn't? So did I. Curiosity mercifully spared my cat, but that was pretty much all that was spared. It was a biblical flood for my little pentium-90, with no ark to be found. Ah well, it was disposable at that point anyway. Moral: When the computer industry tells you something, and the techs on the internet agree, believe them ;-} -Brian ----------------------- Brian J. Sweeney "I want to know God's thoughts ... the rest are details." -Albert Einstein Systems Admin, imagedog [EMAIL PROTECTED] --------Original Message---------------- From: "Wood, Mary" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> To: "'[EMAIL PROTECTED]'" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> Date: Thu, 8 Mar 2001 10:27:41 -0700 charset="iso-8859-1" Subject: [techtalk] Help with hardware woes? Putting out a general distress call to see if anyone else out there has run into a similar problem ... and was able to do something about it besides convert the PC into a cat litter box. I'm working on a Dell Optiplex GX200 running Win2k (no, not Linux, but I'm reasonably certain this is hardware and not OS related). User left PC on when he went to lunch, came back to find monitor in power save mode (which it should be). But moving mouse/pressing keys on keyboard did not bring up video. He tried powering off PC, but it wouldn't power off (being a Dell, he probably didn't hold power button in long enough) so he turned off surge strip to cut power to PC. Waited a few seconds, powered PC back on, got a pre-POST message saying "memory parity failure." We have since been unable to boot machine past this message and address given is different each time we get the message. More often than not, attempts to boot result in no video, yellow light on monitor as if it's not detecting PC. Called Dell yesterday and they took me through the usual steps; "disconnect this and test, disconnect that and test, disconnect everything but power supply and test. Dell and I concurred a new motherboard was the next logical step and they shipped one to me. Just put in the new motherboard, testing each time I connected something new. All ok until I hooked up HD and CD-Rom/floppy (CD and floppy both on IDE 2 ... it's one of those new super floppy jobs). PC powered up ok, but didn't detect any drives. I powered down, pushed cables in to make sure they were secure, powered up and it's back to the same problem; memory parity error. Disconnected drives, connect that, disconnect this, same problem ... back to square one. I've also tried switching memory chips (PC uses RIMM; 1 memory chip and 1 dummy chip). No effect. Any ideas? Ever run into something like this before? Thanks in advance - Mary, the ever growing little PC tech. --------End Original Message---------------- _______________________________________________ techtalk mailing list [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://www.linux.org.uk/mailman/listinfo/techtalk
