Re: Anybody have a manual for the AST RamStak Plus IIgs Memory Card? (eom)

[Glenn Jones <rg.jones@rogers.com>]

Michael J. Mahon wrote:
> Glenn Jones wrote:
>
> > pilgrimer@gmail.com wrote:
> >
> > > http://www.syndicomm.com/~pilgrimer/nfh/ramstak.sit
> > >
> > > I found that lurcking on the Vulcan of a GS I have
> > > -Bart
> > > Keeper of the Network From Heck
> > Hi Bart,
> >
> > Thanks for the software.
> >
> > The Card I have seems to be somewhat flakey as I get errors on booting 
> > GS/OS some times.
> >
> > I have reseated all the RAM once which seemed to work for a day or so
> > I then replaced all the RAM with RAM from a 1 MB apple RAM card which 
> > also seemed to work for a while.
> >
> > My conclusion is that one of the soldered on memory or support chips 
> > is marginal ..
> >
> > Anybody have a circuit for a dram chip tester?
>
>
> Rich is right--the parameters you really care about will only
> be tested by extended running of a IIgs memory test, not by
> any tester.
>
> I would also suspect cracked solder joints or a microscopic crack
> in a copper trace.  If you can arrange to heat and cool parts of
> the board locally (hair dryer and cooling spray) you may find the
> area causing trouble.  Applying pressure with a plastic rod can
> also help.  All these tests need to be done _while_ a memory test
> is running.
>
> -michael
>
> 8-voice music synthesizer using NadaNet networking!
> Home page:  http://members.aol.com/MJMahon/

I want to test individual chips to determine the bad one(s). For this 
card and other memory chips as well.

There is also a bit of a catch 22 here ... I can't get the tests running 
if the OS fails to load due to the bad card.

Do you guys know of anyway to tell GS/OS to ignore the memory card on 
bootup (use internal ram only) then allow me access after the OS is loaded?

The AST RamStak plus software tests each bank and flags a bank that is 
not functioning properly.

It may even be a two fold problem. I ran the test on the Apple II one 
meg card and all the memory checked out.

I swapped 768K of ram between cards and now the Apple II card fails to 
load GS/OS (so we know there ware actualy some bad ram chips on the AST 
RamStak) but there are still problems with the RamStak.

As well the RamStak will load GS/OS ocassionaly and it has determined 
that now that the third bank is suspect (so either I did damage swapping 
chips) or something else is wrong.

Not having docs I am not sure how to disable banks 1-3 to leave only the 
 on board RAM active.

Glenn