Swapping memory to achieve boot?

SkyBum

Senior member
Oct 16, 2004
844
7
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My rig seems to be developing a problem with booting. On occasion it powers down during the boot up screen, it appears to happen at the memory portion (though it's hard to tell for sure).

The first time this happened, after trying to boot several times unsuccessfully, I swapped the 2X 1gb sticks and it booted fine. The second time this happened (several days later), I swapped them back to their original positions and once again, it booted fine after the swap.

Just wondering why the swap is allowing my system to boot? I assume one of my sticks may be bad, though I cannot currently run memtest due to my DVD drive having problems reading discs so I cannot boot from a disc.

FX-60
A8N32-SLI
2X 1GB OCZ Platinum PC 4000 EB
 

CurseTheSky

Diamond Member
Oct 21, 2006
5,401
2
0
It could be something as stupid as a heat problem. Have you tried just letting it sit for an hour, then booting it after it has cooled down?

Another thing to check is the power supply. While it's booting, you can use a voltmeter / DMM to measure the 12V rail by grabbing a spare molex (4 pin, used for IDE optical drives, IDE hard drives, fans, etc.) and plug the red DMM lead into the yellow molex wire hole, and the black lead into a black wire hole. It should read roughly 12V (less than ~11.7V is a problem, and more than ~12.3V is a problem). Similarly, you can measure the 5V rail by plugging the red lead into the red wire hole, and black into black.

If both of those things check out ok, I'd suspect it's either the memory (both sets?) or the motherboard. Try running memtest86 if you can get that far.
 

SkyBum

Senior member
Oct 16, 2004
844
7
81
Thanks very much for your suggestions Curse. I have a buddy stopping by with a voltmeter tonight and will follow your advice.

Currently, (without playing "random memory dimms") it takes about 15-20 boot attempts to get past initializing memory in the boot screen without the machine just powering down.