Proprietary compaq mainboard mem prob

[causticVapor]

I have a friend who recently tried to add another stick of RAM into his old compaq system (that little m-something). The motherboard surprisingly sports the 440BX and it has integrated ATi Rage LT Pro (ultimate irony) graphics. How can you have a light pro!!! :confused: :rolleyes: ..No AGP slot. And to think that was the whole point of the 440 series chipsets!! :mad: :rolleyes:

He upgraded his vid card to a PCI GF2 MX 440 (HUGE boost) and from a P2-266 to a celeron 400 (Free swap). He previously had two PC100 modules in there, and after adding a thrid one the extremely rudimentary and crappy BIOS said "memory size error" and won't POST... is there a way areound this? REseating the BIOS IC or pulling out the batt? The baby BIOS is EXTREMELY restrictive and doesn't let you alter anything... :rolleyes: :mad:

The compaq tech specs say this board will support up to 384MB of RAM (3×128), even though I know the BX chipset can recognize up to 1GB. :rolleyes: Trying 3×128 generated this error.


Anyone had this problem before? How is it fixed/worked around?

[BigBlue66]

This happens often with the older boards. The CMOS is reporting to you that it doesn't know what the heck is going on, or doesn't know how much memory there is supposed to be.

All you have to do when you see the memory size error is enter CMOS Setup. Once in there, don't change anything, just SAVE and Exit. This will effectively update the CMOS so it sees the additional and/or total memory.

[rmanet]

it's F10 for compaqs, but it might be incompatible memory that's hanging the system if you can't get into bios as the access is from the diagnostics partition on the HDD - I assume you've swapped 'em around and you're getting the same error every time?