Ram size detection problems

[Mavrick007]

I came home yesterday and turned on the monitor to see a windows protection fault problem I did a hard boot and it reoccured.
I went into safe mode and found no hardware problem, but when I checked properties it read only 128megs of ram and I have a 256meg
double sided stick of Crucial PC2100. I thought this was strange so I rebooted and it was the same but I could go to windows normal mode.

I went into the bios and saved and this time it came up as 256megs so I booted again and ran Memtest and it gave me a bunch of errors.
Then I took the ram out, reseated it in the socket and did a couple of passes and it came up with no errors this time. I tested my other sticks
one at a time and nothing was wrong. I tested this "bad" stick with another Crucial 256meg stick and it reports it incorrectly again, only 384megs ram.

So I again took it out and tested just the one stick, and in more than one slot and the same thing occurs. Now I can not get it detect as anything but 128megs.

The errors seem to be all in the first half of the ram (ie. 0k to 128Meg) from the error readings I received in Memtest when it did correct detection at
256megs. Could the bios just "blacklist" an area of the ram like scandisk does for bad sectors? Or is this just an erratic thing happening?

I don't think I've ever seen this happen before. My ram settings are pushed to the limit in the bios too but even when lowering them back, it still is
not detected correctly. I have two sticks of 256meg "mixed" pc2100 ram in the first two slots now and they're detecting correctly at 512megs and
memtest gave me no errors at all after about 16passes when I fell asleep.

Any ideas?

 

[kayatai]

since the problem ram is from crucial and they have a lifetime warrenty why don't you call them up and have it replaced?

 

[Mavrick007]

I didn't buy the ram "from" Crucial, I bought the Crucial ram from Ncix so I don't know if the warranty holds.
I read something somewhere that you need to buy the ram directly from Crucial to have the warranty.
Heh Somebody please tell me if I'm wrong cause I would like to be wrong

 

[Steven the Leech]

No if you purchased from other source you have to send the RAM in before they ship out replacement.

Call them up.

 

[Mavrick007]

That's no problem, I don't mind sending the stuff in at all if they'll replace it with a good stick.
I'll give them a call and see what happens, thanx.