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orph

macrumors 68000
Original poster
Dec 12, 2005
1,884
393
UK
hay
left my 3.1 over night sleeping and woke up to find the front power light blinking, pulled drives and swapped gpu with no luck till i started pulling ram and with two sticks installed only one showed up (but i booted)

now looks like the top ram bored is not happy what steps can i take to narrow the problem down?

is it possible/safe to try the top ram bored in the bottom slot to see if it's the plug or the bored itself?

can i run with just the lower ram and 4 sticks installed? is that safe?

any advice or tips welcome

ps
i can boot with just the bottom ram bored with 1 slot of ram installed
 

Alaska_guy

macrumors regular
Mar 30, 2018
137
12
I would add memory one by one until you have the boot issue... Set that stick of ram aside and continue with the rest of the ram until it has booting issues again. More than likely just a bad stick or seated bad. My dads 2008 has the same issue. He ended up with 2 bad sticks.
 

nigelbb

macrumors 65816
Dec 22, 2012
1,150
273
Any time I have reconfigured memory on my 3,1 I have always had to spend time shuffling & reseating FB-DIMMs until it's eventually happy. Try cleaning the contacts on the memory boards & the carrier.
 

orph

macrumors 68000
Original poster
Dec 12, 2005
1,884
393
UK
thanks, yes spent the night pulling sticks and swapping trays not 100% as it seems slightly intermittent.
may be one of my 4GB ram sticks or one of the ram trays :( idk which is worse pain, the trays look cheep on ebay.

ill spend more time on it tonight, hope it's just dust or a loss ram stick

one step closer to me ripping out the insides and making a hack :rolleyes:
 
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