On 12/12/2013 02:11 PM, Goren Buckwalk wrote:
Having not been warned off, I'll post another.
I have a system with two AMD Athlon 2400 MP processors and the motherboard has
4 slots for RAM. It still runes squeeze (too lazy to upgrade, sorry). About a
year ago it locked-up and on reboot it beeped like crazy before the POST got
very far. I started to go through and remove one stick of RAM at a time to see
if it was bad, and on the first one, the one in slot 4, after taking it out, it
rebooted and worked fine. So I figured that stick was just bad and left it at
that. I didn't have any other sticks of the right DDR type and I didn't bother
to replace it.
About a month ago, I found the box crashed again and beeping on reboot, so
going through the same elimination process found only the stick in the first
slot would work. It seemed odd two sticks could go bad at the same time, so I
tried them in that first slot and both worked. I tried adding some back and no
matter the combination except for one single stick, always got a beep-fest. So
I think all the RAM is good, but the last three slots are bad (or maybe just
the 2nd is bad, and then the 3rd and 4th can't work without the 2nd??).
Looking closer I see three capacitors on the board (nearer to the CPUS than the
ram slots) have a rusty looking coating on the top. One is worse looking than
the other two (eh?), the two have some part of their tops that still look shiny
silver. I've heard of capacitors going bad on motherboards, but never saw any.
Is this rust a sign of failure and could their failure be the cause of the RAM
slot problems?
Other than the lockups/memory beeping I've never really seen any issues with
this system (did replace bad drive once or twice). It has boinc/seti/asteroids,
webserver(s) and other stuff running (except when running BOINC its not heavily
stressed but generally is doing _some_ work pretty much all the time).
Are three rusty capacitors and 3 bad slots just a coincidence? Thanks.
As a subscriber to various electronics lists, I can tell you that the
first thing you will be told, when repairing modern electronic equipment, is
to look for bad caps and replace them. So I wouldn't even think twice
about it! Replace the capacitors! But if you've never worked on a printed
circuit board before, I strongly suggest that you find someone who has
to do it for you! Motherboards are multi-layer, and you have to be careful
not to damage it.
Good luck--doug (WA2SAY)
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