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I am having a PC with Pentium IV(4) which has two RAM slots. My PC already had 1 GB RAM in one of the slots and I then purchased another RAM stick of 1GB RAM as my PC supports only 2GB.

It worked fine until one day I decided to clean my computer and I took out the ram sticks and dusted. When I tried to turn on my PC, it did not boot and got stuck in the BIOS. I knew this was because one of the RAM sticks were not properly installed. I took out and re-inserted the RAM sticks but still I was out of luck.

Then I decided to put in only one RAM stick and the PC booted. I tried checking that if one of the RAM slots were faulty by putting another stick in the other slot and, it booted.

These are the things that I tried -

  1. Inserting RAM1 in Slot1 - Booted.
  2. Inserting RAM1 in Slot2 - Booted.
  3. Inserting RAM2 in Slot1 - Booted.
  4. Inserting RAM2 in Slot2 - Booted.
  5. Inserting RAM1 in Slot1 and RAM2 in Slot2 - Stuck in BIOS0 :(
  6. Inserting RAM1 in Slot2 and RAM2 in Slot1 - Stuck in BIOS again.. :(

Please help. I would really appreciate it.

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4
  • Are both ram sticks the same speed etc? if so, then its likely that your motherboard is defective. I recently had the same thing with an old pc. 2 identical rams (except for age) in a pc, and the pc would crash more and more. taking one out, no problems.
    – LPChip
    Commented Aug 13, 2015 at 12:31
  • The ram sticks are the same speed. Might be the motherboard problem. Thanks BTW.
    – Paul TechGeek
    Commented Aug 13, 2015 at 12:42
  • 2
    Have you tried a hard BIOS reset?
    – qasdfdsaq
    Commented Aug 13, 2015 at 13:35
  • I dont know much about it. Can you give me more details.
    – Paul TechGeek
    Commented Aug 14, 2015 at 3:35

1 Answer 1

Reset to default
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I've had exactly the same thing happening on a Core2Duo system.
Turned out that really one of the RAMs was damaged (spontaneous bit-flips) but it only showed if both strips where in, or (in case of a single strip) when the memory was really used, which didn't happen during boot, only when Windows was up and running and programs got loaded.
(I suppose that with both strips in the memory was used in dual-channel mode which by sheer luck triggered the problem immediately.)

Get yourself a copy of memtest86+ (http://www.memtest.org/) and test each strip individually.
Test each strip in each slot separately. There is a small chance the slot itself is faulty in stead of the RAM.

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  • I've seen cases where teach of two RAM DIMMs worked fine by itself, and they would work fine together in machine A... but wouldn't work together in machine B. Machine B worked fine with two other DIMMs. Motherboard issue? Issue with one or the other of the DIMMs? Unknown. Sometimes you just have to live with "we have a solution, but we don't really know why."
    – Jamie Hanrahan
    Commented May 9, 2017 at 17:55

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