Error after post... Urgent help needed

TheCorporal

Member
Feb 18, 2000
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Yea I know everyone says "help needed and fast", but this is a production server in our server farm and we were hoping to get it up last night for the launch of our network. Anyways, don't let me bore you with my sappy story, here is the problem...

We are setting up a dedicated database Linux box and the specs can be found here (http://www.realgn.com/upgrade/). Notice the Supermicro board (onboard ethernet, Ultra160 SCSI, and sound), the 1 gig of PC133 ECC ram, and the dual P3 866's. Anyways, we set everything up, put it all on the board and booted for the first time. Yay, it POST'd. Yay it recognized the Ultra160 IBM 10k 18 GB HD. Yay it recognized all the ram.

Past that... *KONK*. Yea, after posting and all the SCSI cards and onboard features from the mobo get loaded up the screen goes blank and we get this error. "EMM386: Unrecoverable Privelege Error" Now if I remember correctly, EMM386.exe in windows is related to low level memory functions right? Well I think we tried every possible combination of ram configurations (1 chip, 2, 3, different locations, paired, etc), and still the same error comes up.

I have been looking through Deja (now owned by google), Northernlight.com, and many other places, but I think I am going to have to revert to posting on forums all over the place to see if anything will popup. I would really appreciate anyone who might know what is causing this.

Thanx a lot guys!
 

Andrew99

Member
Jan 7, 2001
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I didn't like the link... This one is mo better..
http://www.realgn.com/upgrade/

EMM386.exe ... Expanded memory manager... This is used to allocate extended memory into expanded memory that certain programs are written to take advantage of ... (I recall Wing commander used this back in "the day" ... If you wanted the little extra stuff like seeing the hand on the flight stick in the cockpit, etc...) I dont' see how this can be a BIOS issue... probably not a true "hardware" issue either...

What OS is this running? EMM386 errors are not hardware system errors, they are operating system errors.. What do your config.sys and autoexec.bat files look like .... Either emm386 has a hardware problem like bad memory, or it has a software problem like a conflict...

You might be loading something in DOS ...

If it gets to this error, then it is definately getting past the hardware bootup (POST and all)... focus on software.. At what point of your Operating System boot does this occur? If you just boot into DOS, without using any extended/expanded memory (no himem.sys, no emm386.exe) then you should not get this error at all...

Also, I find the "Black CDROM and floppy" description a bit unusual...

We need more details about your OS... and the autoexec.bat and config.sys.. And any hard drive overlays that you might have installed.
 

TheCorporal

Member
Feb 18, 2000
25
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Heh sorry about the CDROM descrip =)

Btw, no OS installed, clean HD, nothing at all, actually we are trying to boot from a floppy for the first time so other than that its not touching ANY OS.

First of all, after my 3 hours of research I found that my initial assumption that EMM386 has to do with windows is false. The low level memory function supported by a motherboard is called EMM386, it just so happens the Microsoft programmers decided to call their windows 32bit version of it the same thing.

Thanks for the help though...