Checksum & HDD

[bwbarbieri]

A friend of mine recently replaced two of his four RAM chipboards with one 32MB CB he took out of a used PC. This resulted in "Checksum Error" just after the POST. When he reinstated his original RAM, he found his (Windows 95, compressed) hard drive was totally screwed up. Nothing readable. Couldn't even boot off of C; had to use a floppy.

Is this the CMOS checksum? And if so, how does that affect the HD? Is it possible to reverse the problem?

[BFlurie]

"Checksum error" appearing RIGHT after a reboot does sound like a BIOS message. Sounds like the memory wasn't being recognized properly. Why it screwed up the HD -- I don't know. Did it finish booting to Winders? If not, how did he know the compressed drive was screwed up?
Drvspace3 compressed drives usually work fine -- but they are a bit more prone to failure than regular drives.

[This message has been edited by BFlurie (edited 12-14-2000).]

[bwbarbieri]

It didn't finish booting to windows. He had to use a boot disk to see the C drive. That's when he could tell everything was messed up pretty bad.

I think the RAM he introduced probably created problems with the CMOS. This in turn disrupted his memory settings, and so on. The end result being a bad configuration of the hard disk.

My friend just told me he reformatted the drive. So I guess there's no way to correct the problem other than to start rebuilding his drive again.

[BFlurie]

Well, the point's moot now, but you need special files (drvspace.bin) on a DOS boot floppy to ""see" a compressed drive in DOS.

[Win_98]

converting to fat32 also screw up compressed drive as fat32 doesn't support it.

[Rat]

BW,
Try using the original memory, clear the CMOS and turn the computer on, see if it boots. It may just need the CMOS to be cleared to get things back to normal.

Win_98:
It's highly unlikely that the File System has changed itself magically. The problem here stems from putting an incompatible RAM in the system. It is likely the hdd parameters has been corrupted in the BIOS.


Rat...