Friend upgraded ram, need some help......

[Inferior]

My friend just bought a pile of upgrades for his computer, A voodoo 3 3000, a 13.6 gig hd, a 56k modem, and 64 megs of ram.

The thing is, the computer is now using 32 megs of edo ram, but he bought 64 megs of pc100.The board can take both, but when I took out the old ram and put in the new, nothing happened, it didn't boot up, nothing came up on the screen and the hd did nothing.

Whats going on, do I need to change something in the bios or something? For you see, I have no experience with boards that can take both ram types. Actually, come to think about it, I don't have any experience with edo ram at all for that matter......

Someone give me some tips on how to get this working!!!!

[DrCorvette]

You'll need to check the mobo info, on some you can only run like say, one particular slot for the sdram and like two on the edo or fill all slots of either full. I know one of my American Megatrends mobos is like that, also, some ram needs about 7 tons of force to make it go in the slot, I use newspaper to "back up" the mobo so it don't crack. Check the documentation. I have used "Generic" ram on my HP which is supposed to be a real big NO-NO and it worked fine.

[Inferior]

Actually, I found the problem.

It was that the hooks were too low, they don't reach up high enough to go into the divets for them. It must be that when that computer was made, pc66 was all that existed and I guess the divets is lower on them...

But now he has another problem. I took out his old hd and hoped on installing windows on the new one. but when I get to DOS, I try to get to c:, and it says something about a media problem and states abort, retry, fail...... The infamous annoying choice.

And than when I pop in the windows cd, it says invalid drive for d: and I know the cd is fine and the drives are hooked up right. C: is the hd, D: is the cd-rom. And this is a really good cd-rom, so I can't see what the problem is!!!!

HELP!!!!!!

[Eli]

You probably need to boot from a floppy and format the hard drive. You may need to fdisk it first though.

[LeitGeist]

If you want to get the best from this 13+GB HDD you'll really need to format it under FAT 32, so I suggest you use a Windows 98 Boot disk with the 98 FDisk on it. This will asl you if you want to enable large HDD support. Answer "y" at the prompt, FDISK the HDD then format it.

Assuming there are no BIOS limits on the mobo you should be able to then proceed with setting up this sytem.

BTW, have you thought of using Ghost or similar to simply copy the old operating system right across? Ghost 5x will convert from FAT 16 to FAT 32 in the process.

Regards

[Inferior]

Eli, I did use a boot disk and it does what I said there in DOS.

As for you LeitGeist, I thought FAT32 was better than FAT16, so why would I want to convert it?

I heard that on older computers, the highest they can recognize is an 8 gig hd, and thats what its doing, but the comp can still use the 13.6 gigs can't it? That is because of the FAT32/16 thing isn't it.....

[howste]

The 8 gig limit is a motherboard/BIOS, not FAT16/32 issue. If there is an upgrade to your mobo's BIOS you could flash it, or you could use drive overlay software available from the hard drive manufacturers website to overcome the 8 gig limit. It may(?) help with your media problem as well.

Steve