Re: GS-RAM-Plus woes

[nathan@cco.caltech.edu (Nathan Mates)]

In article <4oal4t$9o5@news.ysu.edu>,
Adalbert Goertz <be404@yfn.ysu.edu> wrote:
>I acquired a GS-RAM-Plus (Applied Eng,6meg max) mem board with 2megs
>which gives me problems.
>The diagnostics show first blocks B and C black and after a while the 
>3rd block turns  xxxx and finally it show No good chips on the board.
>The 2 blocks of chips are in blocks A and B, however.

   This is a problem. If there are no chips in C, but the card thinks
there are some chips to some degree, your card is probably bad. Check
for signs of damage to the printed circuit, etc. If possible, return
the board to whomever you got it from as defective.


>When I select all chips to be ram disk thru the control panel,
>and when I catalog RAM5 using basic.system, it shows the full 2 megs
>as being avaibable minus 8k. So, that seems to be ok.

   What amount of memory is shown doesn't mean a darn thing as to its
reliability or anything else. The system only does a quick check at
boot, and if it passes a very quick test, it's counted as 'good'
ram. Further, the scanning is from the top down, so if there are holes
of bad memory, your system is in very bad shape. 

   For example, if you put the 2 sets of chips in blocks E & F, the GS
would probably think you had 6MB installed, without bothering to check
that the first 4MB of ram actually worked. Similarly, if you've got some
bad ram in the middle, it may detect 2MB, but not all of it is usable.

   I had a friend in High School who upgraded his GS Ram card (not the
plus, but the theory is the same) with 4 blocks of 256K. He put them
in the top 2 rows on the card, thus filling blocks A, B, D & E. The
system thought he had enough ram for A-E filled, but programs died
fairly horribly when they tried to use stuff "stored" in the empty
block C. After he moved the chips so that A-D were filled, things
worked much better.


>I also can copy files to RAM5.

   /RAM5 doesn't check on writing that the files were copied
successfully.  You can thus copy what you like in, and I'd bet that
large chunks of what you copied is lost.


>When I boot GSOS 601, the thermometer stops briefly at about 10% with a beep
>and continues to the full length andjust hangs.
>So, what is going on? 

   The thermometer will always keep going until it's told to stop by
the completion of loading GS/OS, inits, and the like. The 'beep' is
GS/OS crashing while booting, but that doesn't stop the thermometer.


>The diagnostics always shows block B black (ok).
>VCould something else be wrong except the memopry chips?

   If the chips are in A&B, but A fails the check, swap the chips in
blocks A & B. If there are no chips in C, but the diagnostics can
'see' memory there, there is a problem-- probably a bad card.

Nathan Mates
-- 
<*> Nathan Mates http://www.ugcs.caltech.edu/~nathan/      <*>
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