--- In os2hardware{at}yahoogroups.com, "Jon Harrison"
 wrote:
>
> On Sat, 09 Feb 2008 22:55:47 -0000, Alan Beagley wrote:
> 
> >
> >I am coming to the conclusion that the motherboard has a problem. I've
> >tried three different SCSI cards in two different PCI slots and with
> >two different cables and terminators. Sometimes I cannot get into the
> >BIOS of any of the SCSI cards; sometimes the SCSI card "signs
on" but
> >then can't find any devices; sometimes I get strange error messages or
> >just plain garbage from the SCSI adapter (e.g., "PMM failed deallocate
> >function" or "configuration invalid" or a display
consisting mostly of
> >question marks from the Adaptec card, or some graphics characters from
> >either of the LSILogic cards). Sometimes I cannot get into the mobo
> >BIOS. Sometimes it will not boot from a CD.


> I recently experienced all of the above problems, *except* the
> strange error messages that you report.  I am using a Tyan 2466
> board.  I also found a problem with one ram stick that the bios saw
> but when I ran memtest it failed.  The most recent changes I have
> made to my system, in addition to the new cable & terminator, is to
> replace the MB and remove 1 stick of ram.  It's be stable since
> then.  Unfortuately, the above 3 changes were made very close to
> each other so I cannot say one item alone solved the problem. 
> Fiddling with RAM is probably the cheapest thing to try.  But since
> the MB bios is giving problems maybe it is the board itself (or
> battery?).
> 
> In the last 8 months I've gone through 3 of these MB's from eBay. 
> The first one was the flaky one.  The next one wouldn't post and I
> had to go through a dispute process at Paypal to get my money back,
> that took almost 8 weeks.  The board I most recently aquired has a
> bad ram slot but I can still use 3 sticks to get to 2GB ram so
> considering my most recent experience and the stability so far I am
> satisfied (considering the price I paid).  It's the first time in 8
> or so years of eBay purchases that I've had a bad run of luck.

Thanks for the memtest suggestion, Jon. As I started it up I noticed
that ECC was disabled (I'd forgotten to reenable it after resetting to
BIOS defaults), but let the test complete anyway, which it did with no
errors. I then went back and reenabled ECC in the BIOS and started
memtest again; this time it churned out a screenful of hexadecimal
gobbledygook almost immediately, but there was also an abbreviation I
took to mean "General Protection Fault." I've repeated this test
several times now, with the same result. Does this mean that the
memory is bad or that the motherboard is bad?

Both the mobo (Asus) and the RAM (Kingston) were bought from
newegg.com, so they should be covered by the manufacturers' warranties
-- 3-year and lifetime, respectively, I think.

In the meantime I'm going to try one of those SCSI cards again with
the machine in non-ECC mode.

-=-
Alan




 
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