Upgraded system ram can't boot into win7 now.. Help!

gizmo1990

gizmo1990

gizmo1990

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I've just upgraded my system to 4gb (ddr2 6400) from 2gb and my pc seems to have thrown a major hissy fit. Basically as soon as I booted it up it had trouble getting into windows (7) and kept restarting.
Sometimes I'd be able to safe boot and get to the desktop but it will either restart all of a sudden or when I try to boot normally it will just say it needs to repair itself and run a self diagnostic. At some point it said it could run a memory diagnostic which I let it do and it passed ok.
The only hd I'm running at the moment is a intel 80gb ssd. I've bought a nice samsung 1tb to run as a d drive with my 80gb ssd purely as a boot drive but I havent installed it yet. So the system is only running with the ssd.

Does anyone know what this all sounds like? I'm hoping that a reformat and reinstall of win7 onto my ssd will clear it up but I'm worried it could be something else? The memory perhaps? Yet it reports fine in the bios and the win diagnostic completed fine... The ssd? It's pretty much new though and was running fine before I did this (ram) upgrade...

Any ideas anyone? Advice greatly appreciated.
 
And does it return to normal when you take the new stick out?

Are they the same timings and voltage?
 
Are you running 4 x 1gb of memory? If so, youll need to up the north bridge voltage a notch or two.
 
Don't reinstall Windows until you've solved the instability. Installing Windows with unstable RAM will be lots of effort and probably make the situation worse.

We need to know more. What is your hardware? Are you overclocked? What are your timings? Is this 4x1GB or 2X2GB? As setter pointed out, running four sticks normally requires some voltages to be raised.
 
Thanks for the replies guys.

Right well the mobo is a small Zotec 9300 wifi and I was running 2gb of Corsair xms 5400 675mhz ram in 2x 1 gb sticks. I think its timings are 4-4-4-12
I then got some OCZ Gold Edition 4GB (2x2GB) 800mhz PC2-6400C5 and put that in. It's timings are 5-5-5-18.
The Zotec will take two DDR2 DIMM slots for up to 8GB 667/800MHz.

So the memory is a different speed but that should be fine shouldn't it? Should I have changed something in the bios for it to register the new ram? I did the usual thing of running the bios prior to first boot and checking it could see the ram and then saving and exiting. Should I have done something else?

Really appreciate all the help. Please keep it coming as I desperately need this machine up and running. I'm having to use a old p3 laptop to send these posts!! :(
 
stulid said:
And does it return to normal when you take the new stick out?

Are they the same timings and voltage?
Click to expand...
I can't easily take the ram out again to check the old ram as I'll have to take off the damn heatsink too! It obscures the ram slots. I'll do it but I'd prefer confirmation that something is up with the memory?

And no the timings and voltage are different from my last ram, see my post above. Unless you mean are they different being used at the same time? In which case no they are a matched pair.

Oh and I'm not oc'ing just regular default settings.
 
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You need to up the voltage on the motherboard for the ram.

It's probably running at 1.8 now, and that ram needs 2.1

In the BIOS, set the ram voltage to +0.3


I had the same problem, now it's 100% stable
 
bledd. said:
You need to up the voltage on the motherboard for the ram.

It's probably running at 1.8 now, and that ram needs 2.1

In the BIOS, set the ram voltage to +0.3


I had the same problem, now it's 100% stable
Click to expand...
I've never messed with ram settings much. Currently it looks like the ram voltage is running at 1.9 at least that's what it says next to the 'MEM voltage control' heading. Does that sound about right? So I should change that to 2.1?
 
Ok I set the voltage and windows booted ok. But then after a shutdown it's continually blue screening with a CACHE_MANAGER error or a SYSTEM_SERVICE_EXCEPTION error?? Or it just blue screens and before I can read what the blue screen says it just reboots.. What the heck is going on!? Does anyone know what this could be pointing to? It has managed to boot successfully about twice during this too but each reboot after results in blue screens..!

Also there's another voltage setting by the mem voltage control, it's called NB voltage control. I'm guessing it's the northbridge and it's currently set to 1.10 volt? Should I be changing that now that I've changed the ram voltage?

Gah, please help! :(:(
 
Hi Admiral,

There is no auto setting for the nb or mem voltage control. I've just set the nb voltage to 1.20 and I've managed to get the sytem to reboot twice in a row and not blue screen.. progress?

I've also tried to run chkdsk with a full check but it gets through a few passes and on the 3rd or 4th one blue screens.. Could this indicate anything? I also noticed during the chkdsk routine that the ssd was make a high pitched squeling noise.. is this normal? Could something be wrong with the ssd?

Really appreciate the help.
 
Ok, on a hunch I installed intels ssd toolbox software and ran the fast and and it's reporting:
data integrity scan, failed (*#!):(:(

Could this be the problem? Are there any ssd experts out there? Perhaps I should post a thread in the hd section?
Basically I need to be 100% sure the ssd is borked before I go through the hassle of rma'ing it.

So to sum up, is all that I've been reporting and now this toolbox scan fail, pointing to the ssd being screwed?
 
Carefull, the Corsair PC5400 probably ISNT rated for 2.1V at the very least it will invalidate the warrenty.. The OCZ on the other hand love volts, so its not an ideal mix.

No point in testing the SSD if your not 100% sure the ram is fine, as any program running on the CPU is liable to be giving errors if the ram is bad, so it will give false errors on the disk. You'll probably want to wipe the SSD and reinstall after you have proven the memory is good, with at least 4-6 hours of Memtest86.

EDIT... My Mistake you only installed the 2x2GB, in my system I left the old memory in, giving 6GB total.. Memtested just fine so I left it in :). Anyway for 2x2GB of OCZ just ramp up the volts.

Mind you there is a good chance you corrupted the windows install if the ram was not stable and you booted up. Reformat/wipe/trim and reinstall... But only after you have passed a few cycles of memtest 86.
 
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Thanks for the info Corasik.

I've replied in my harddrive thread. Basically what I'd like to know now is could I have f*ked my ssd up by booting continually?

I'll be installing and running memtest86 tomorrow. What version should I be using of it? From it's website it says that it doesn't support 4gb..?
 
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