/me cries :cries: I've had nothing but trouble from this lump of rubbish Firstly, it decided not to work until after several hours me and a friend decided to try the RAM in the third slot, instead of the first and second. It finally booted up. Unfortunatly it didnt seem to like my floppy drive, but this wasnt a problem as I was gonna send it off anyway. I'd tested the other components and they all worked perfectly. I got the motherboard back today after the company (ebuyer.com) said they couldnt find anything wrong with it. I booted it up: it crashed. I rebooted and went to BIOS. That also froze. By this point I was a little worried, but not too badly. I reset the CMOS and tried again. Nothing. All I get now is this REALLY annoying long, single beep. THis happened the first time, so I tried moving the RAM around in different slots. Still nothing. I read somewhere that the long single beep means a RAM related problem, and I am sorry to admit that I am using generic RAM. I dont have easy access to another stick of DDR RAM, so I thought I'd ask here before writing to ebuyer/abit and trying to get another stick. I'd love to by a stick of Crucial ASAP, but I cant afford it. Any ideas on what could be wrong? ~Sepherus P.S. The other components are: Athlon XP1800+, Maxtor 40GB HDD, SbLive! 5.1, Cheap NIC, SuperGrace Radeon 7500, 256MB Generic PC2100 DDR, Liteon DVD, generic FDD, 250Watt PSU.
you should have a motherboard manual and in there it will have a table of what the different beeps mean.
if you can get the make and the model number then you should beable to get on the manufacturor's website and it should tell you on there.
It appears to be a DRAM problem. If I can get a friend to test the memory, what am I looking for? Will it simply refuse to work, or i it possible that it will work in systems other than mine?
Yeah I had the problem with a stick of memory that would work in another mobo but not in mine, so i returned the memory and got a stick of crucial. It seems motherboards are getting more picky of what type of memory they work with nowdays.
I seen in your "other components" that you mention a 250 Watt power supply. If your ram was that bad I doubt you'd be able to even get into your bios. To me it sounds like a PS problem. 250 Watt is awfully small for running a system like that one. I would suggest borrowing a friend's supply, or if you can afford a more powerful supply get one. Shannon
I had the long beeep and nothing else problem a while ago witha 400w psu and crucial ram so its nothing to do with that anyways i fixed the prob by moving my ram to bank 3 now its fine.
it could be the psu as it seems a bit... well lame. I used to have problems with the psu where i couldn't run my pc with the fsb at 133 but i got an enermax psu 350W. If you get a friend to test it and it works then you know it might be the psu.
I've got a 400watt I normally use, but would the mobo still give the RAM error because of a PSU? And would that cause it to boot once, get to BIOS a second time then not do anything at all? Before I sent the motherboard off for testing everyything was fine when I moved the RAM to the third bank, but that doesnt work anymore.
maybe the ram could have got fried by static, can't you just send it back again and say "it does not do what it is advertised to do or is meant to do" Quote adapted from the sales of goods act from back in the seventies or something. Then threaten them with trading standards and they are most likely are going to start being nice to you and help you out.
I'm gonna try the 400Watt PSU, and if that doesnt work, its RMA time for that crappy generic RAM. I'm kicking myself for buying such junk when Crucial isnt that much more THanks!
Well it sounds like a problem i had not so long ago. Quick history first :- puter ran fine for months, then one day just stopped working. Sent motherboard back and processor. Got replacement processor told nothing wrong with M/B. Any way put it all back together and still would not work. So changed power supply to a 350W and it worked fine, went on to add a load of memory and as soon as i tried to take it to 1Gig it would not boot, take it to 756 Mb boots fine. I put it down to power and cheap memory, but you could also try changing the setting for the memory in the bios if ya ca nget that far. Though AMD do say that you need a minimum of a 300W power supply for an athlon. Hope this helps ya.
I've noticed that with cheaper ram it's spec's are "tigher" when it comes to what it will tolerate for voltage differences. Long ago I had some cheap PC133 that acted much the same way. In my experience if the ram is the problem, it just won't boot at all. In another post on these forums I talk about an experience I had recently with my new EP-8KHAL. My problem was the rams slots were very sensitive to movement on the board. I guess because the board is smaller than the 8KHA+ it's not as rigid. Wasn't there an article on Warp2Search awhile back about the KR7 and memory problems??? Shannon
I tried the 400Watt PSU, but no luck. I'll have a look for that article later Nec (I'm at school at the mo )
I found the article on Warp2Search and here is what it says. ____________________________________________________ Abit KR7A-R Memory Issues?! (Date: 2002-03-29 17:18:58) Topic: Well Overclockers came before me here... ;-). According to various forums ViaHardware #1, ViaHardware #2 and AMDMB forums and by self experience from yesterday it seems highly likely that the KR7A-R has memory timing issues that result from the fourth DIMM slot on the board. Read more... Abit had similar issues with their BH6 motherboard and it was generally concluded that there were interference patterns (multipath signals) which resulted in memory problems. This was more apparent with multiple RAM modules. This "fix" was to locate RAM modules in certain DIMM slots which, it was thought, cancelled out these "reflection errors" - it worked for many BH6 users. Overclockers.com now has done some extended testing on the memory stability of the KR7A-R and in some cases the board failed and once even refused to boot. I was confronted with a similiar issue yesterday after I had to switch a DDR2100 module from DIMM slot 1 to slot 3 (now populated slots 2+3 with 256MB each). Before - when slot 1 and 2 were used - I could use the most agressive RAM timings CL2.5 - Trp:2 - Tras: 5 - Trcd:2 - DRAM Command Rate: 1T and all was well. After the DIMM switch I got LOADS of BSOD's in Windows to a state where it became unusable like from 10 seconds to every ten minutes a crash... I had to revert back to default settings and was looking for a solution. I came across the forums mentioned above and some users suggested upping the FSB to 136-138Mhz. Finally 138Mhz FSB did the trick for me and except DRAM Command Rate set to 2T now (still does not work) timings are back to initial settings and the board is now stable. This leads to the impression though that we are indeed talking about signal interference. Interesting about this is that Overclockers found no problems when using DIMM slot 2 and 3 at 133Mhz FSB while my board malfunctioned! I will test a 512MB Corsair memory stick soon and see if it makes a difference compared to two 256MB sticks... ____________________________________________________ Here is the link to the article. http://www.warp2search.net/article.php?sid=3704 I know it's a shot in the dark. However, you know the old saying "Leave No Stone Unturned". Shannon Hope it helps.
Thanks for that, it hasnt helped in this case unfortunatly, but it was interesting. I have no doubt I'll need that in a months time or so Thanks a lot Gonna go RMA now ~Seph
