Me being Stupid with BIOS

[Turendur]

Hey all,

I was looking in my BIOS the last night because I just got more ram, 2 1gb OCZ Platinum pc 3200, i put it in my computer and it would only read my old ram, I switched the ram and place my new ram in where the old ones where, the old ones 2 512mb OCZ Gold pc 3200 were and it would read only the new ones. Is there a way to make it read both sets so I could have a total of 3 gb?

In the process of looking at the BIOS to see if something there could be changed I changed something to see if it would work... It didnt... I dont remember what it was that I changed but instead of going back to what I changed and rechanging it back I in my stupidity clicked on reset to optimized defaults... and to make a long story short... ive gotten it to try to boot and it gets past all the bios stuff but now windows wont start up and I havent been able to access the boot menu to see if linux on a separate hard drive will boot...

So basically im screwed right now... any advice? Other than stop being dumb?

Nathan

[Turendur]

Oh Here is my specs:

DFI LanParty UT NF4 SLI-D
OCZ PowerStream 520w
AMD Athlon 64 3800+ Venice OEM 2.4 ghz
Lian-Li V1000B-Plus Case
OCZ Platinum Edition PC3200 2x1gb Dual Channel
OCZ Gold Edition PC3200 2x512mb Dual Channel
BFG NVIDIA GeForce 8600 GT OC 256MB PCIe
NEC 3550A Beige Dvd reader/writer
NEC 3550A Black Dvd reader/writer
Scythe Ninja heatsink
D-Link Wireless Card... dont remember model... can get it later tonight thou

[joshSCH]

hmm.. first of all, it's never a good idea to install different ram like that..

Reset to optimized defaults? Have you gone back through the bios to see what has changed? Go through and make sure your hd is there, and that most settings are correct.. It actually might help if you power down, and take out the cmos battery for a bit. Then replace the battery and see if that helps any..

[Turendur]

Ok... i reset the cmos via taking the battery out... and I also took out the 2x512 ram and it works just fine... after a bit of work around... it seems to be running stable...

also out of my own ignorance... im sure I could find it somewhere in the forums... what is the proper way... and I know this is not in the right forum... but...

[joshSCH]

Having 3 ram chips with 1 gig, 512, and 512 will not always register well with the mb. Depending on how old your motherboard is, you may be able to get the system running with 2 gigs.. but more than likely the system will either just recognize the 512 chips or the 1024 chip. I suppose you could try it again in different orders to see if it can even be read properly.. but I think the only thing you can do is buy another gig stick of ram :-/

Perhaps someone else knows something that I don't, though..

[fren]

In addition to the above post.

This is only my opinion but I think you can run all your sticks together in a single channel mode. Mix them in different dimm slots. I am not 100% sure but as I know it is also safe to run any AMD processors in a single channel mode.

One more thing, I think WinME can't handle more than 512 MB of RAM. Try to shift to WinXP.

[Turendur]

Ok to help explain the situation a bit more... my mobo has 4 dimm slots I have 2x1gb sticks and 2x512mb so the computer should see 3gb total... they are exactly the same except for their size... I am running WinXP and I also am running Fedora Core 7 on separate hard drives...

But the bios only recognizes 1 set not both sets...

I am going to play around with the sets tonight and try different configurations of the sticks...

How would I get the sticks to run single channel?

[fren]

I thought it was WinME. Okay place your 2 x 1GB in the first two dimm slots (nearest to the processor) and the rest to the remaining slots. See if it works.

[Turendur]

Yeah I will try that and let you know how it goes.

[fren]

Try one stick at a time. In this case you will be able to detect a bad dimm slot.