Re: Could this be a hardware problem?

From: Richard Tomkins (tomkinsr_at_istop.com)
Date: 12/09/03 

Date: Tue, 9 Dec 2003 10:55:03 -0500

Wow, what a bunch of problems.

1. If the manual says 512MB maximum, then thats what you are restricted to.
The ALphaBIOS was written to be used by many different products, so the 1GB
memory test is for antoher product, not yours.

2. The memory is to be unbuffered is what you stated and thus that is what
it should be.

3. Make sure the Video Card is supported by Windows NT V4.0 on Alpha.

I am always amazed that people can read the various documentation they have
access to and then promptly ignore it.

I did a small survey this past year of the various PC's that I helped
vraious people with. Close to 70% of them had gone out and bought some extra
memory and in the process pushed the system past the design. The results
were systems that crashed once in a while, or would not restart properly, or
would hang on shutdown or sometimes just lock up. By adjusting the memory to
what was the maximum in the specifications, approximately 95% of those
systems strated to work properly as designed. Need I say more.

"Emeric Maschino" <emeric.maschino@jouy.inra.fr> wrote in message
news:8b96a6e87652e870af0106dd14c0fd16.46252@mygate.mailgate.org...
> Hi,
>
> I'm setting up a small workstation based on an AlphaPC 164LX motherboard
> with a 533MHz CPU. Currently, the graphics adapter is a Diamond Stealth
> 64 (waiting for my Permedia 2-based card) and the HDD is an IDE one on
> the onboard primary controller (master). I need to install Windows NT on
> this workstation (because!).
>
> I'm starting with AlphaBIOS 5.66-1 and an IDE CD-ROM drive on the
> onboard primary controller (slave). Once the HDD is successfully
> partitioned with Quick Setup, I choose the option to install Windows NT.
> The CD-ROM LED blinks a few milliseconds, then the screen goes black and
> nothing more happens. I first thought my Windows NT CD-ROM was
> corrupted. Trying an other one gives the same result. Furthermore, the
> Windows NT CD-ROM is correctly recognized: if I insert something else,
> I'm asked to install the Windows NT CD-ROM. So the problem is not here.
> Switching to AlphaBIOS 5.70 doesn't solve my problem. I even tried to
> install from a SCSI Pioneer 303S DVD-ROM drive hooked to an Adaptec 2940
> SCSI adapter (recognized by AlphaBIOS) without success.
>
> For information, this motherboard is fitted with four 256MB sticks of
> Samsung registered ECC PC100 (M377S3320 CT3-C1H) coming from an Itanium
> workstation. I know that the AlphaPC 164LX Technical Reference Manual
> says the memory is expandable up to 512MB only, but there's a Memory
> Testing item in the AlphaBIOS's Advanced CMOS Setup that can be set to
> Full to test up to 1GB RAM. So 1GB should be supported on this
> motherboard and I found many posts of people with such a configuration.
> The bad thing is during the memory test, the system locks at 246MB
> although there's no problem on the Itanium system. Is it due to the fact
> that these memory modules are registered and not unbuffered as stated in
> the AlphaPC Technical Reference Manual? Can this memory problem prevents
> the installation of Windows NT (I haven't try to install Linux yet)?
>
> Where should I go now?
>
> Thanks.
>
>
> --
> Posted via Mailgate.ORG Server - http://www.Mailgate.ORG

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