From: Vernon Wankerl (VWankerl_at_gwrr.com)
Date: Thu Apr 11 2002 - 10:57:26 EDT
Steve,
The history of this is as follows (forgive me for repeating myself but I need to clarify how all this has gone.):
I purchased a used A21m ( I am getting Type and S/N from brother-in-law now ) from a company on e-bay ( I believe it was called Dexis ). It had 64M RAM and W98se with original restore CDs and the warranty good until sometime in May,2002. This was the fourth A2xm series machine I have purchased for myself or others.
I also purchased a 128M RAM dimm from Crucial for this machine.
I wanted to have a dual-boot WIn2000/Win98se machine. Since I had the Win98se restore CD for this machine and a Win2000 restore CD from a previous A21m I had, I thought I could do this easily.
The process I went through was:
PartitionMagic to create 3 partitions out of the 1 original partition. The original Win98se (primary FAT32) in one of them, Win2000 restore CD to another (primary FAT32), and an extended partition for shared data and apps. I also used PowerQuest's BootMagic to perform the dual-boot process. Win2000 was setup as the default under BootMagic.
I got all this set up with no problems. It all seemed to be working fine until I installed the 128M RAM DIMM. Win2000 would spontaneously abort (no programs running, just sitting idle) with a blue screen and error message that I could not read completely because it would then reboot the machine. But the reboot would hang on the Win2000 Starting up screen about half way through. I had to power down to get it started.
Win98se would not do the same but it would randomly hang (lock up the machine) so I had to power down to get out of it.
It seemed to always load either OS from a cold boot but then they would fault in someway that was catestrophic and force another cold boot to recover.
I thought the problem might be the 128M RAM since when I took it out (only original 64M), I didn't have the problems.
I had an A20m with original 64M and an IBM 128M installed with Win2000 installed and working fine. I swapped the 128M in this for the Crucial 128M in the new machine to see if the problems followed the DIMM. Lo and behold the A20m started exhibiting the same problems. A call to Crucial resulted in a new 128M Dimm to try. I put in the new machine and soon had the same problems.
Ok, maybe it is just Crucial 128M Dimms, so I pulled one of the 256M Dimms (Crucial also) from my A22m and put it in the A21m (new machine). Everything seemed to work. Since I didn't have the funds to buy a 256M dimm for the new machine I didn't want to pursue this route yet. So, I put the IBM 128M from the A20m into the new machine and for awhile it seemed to be working also. Maybe I was onto something. Unfortunately, now this configuration is having the same problems.
What is troublesome is that I have 2 different machines with 2 different OS's and 2 different brands of RAM and the problem is still there.
By the way, I am working on my main machine, which is an A22m (2628-ttu) with 512M RAM dual-boot Win2000/Win98se using BootMagic to do dual-boot and PartitionMagic to setup partitions. This machine performs flawlessly.
I am at a loss to know what to do. Since I am using a none standard OS setup, I'm sure EZ-Serve is going to choke. Since I have tried Crucial memory, I'm sure EZ-Serve is going to choke.
Vern
P.S. I ran all the PC Doctor for Windows tests and there were no errors. I ran the memory test program that was recommended from www.simmtester.com (both quick and burnin overnight) and no errors. I have a feeling the new machine is somehow damaging the new RAM I put in but for the life of me I can't figure out how.
>>> Steve C. 04/10/02 11:44PM >>>
I didn't notice the statement about your machine
running W2000 before. It sounds like you are having a
similar problem to james.ritterbusch. See my answer to
his problem. If you machine came with Win98 it may not
be able to run W2000 (or XP) without problems. ME is
probably the best you can do without changing the
motherboard, not to practical in a laptop.
--- vernon wankerl <VWankerl_at_gwrr.com> wrote:
> Steve,
> I ran the PC-Doctor for Windows memory tests and
> didn't get any errors. Is
> there any other memory tests that I could do? The
> PC-Doctor tests didn't seem
> to me to be very intensive.
>
> Vern
=====
Steve Coakley
Managing Director,
Mesa Network Services
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