Help! Parity Error out of the blue!

[Stacey]

Archived from groups: comp.sys.ibm.pc.hardware.chips,comp.os.msdos.misc,comp.sys.ibm.pc.hardware.misc (More info?)

My system has been running great. Until this afternoon!

I was troubleshooting a system card, reseating and so forth. Rebooted
and the boot-up looked fine, counting through all RAM (512k) and loading
device drivers to begin Windows... but just when I should have seen
Win98 desktop I get:

RAM PARITY ERROR - checking for segment - offending segment 0000.
Hit F1 to ignore NMI, F2 to reboot.

Neither key worked. Keyboard frozen. Curser blinks on black screen.

I looked up this error in Google archives but virtually every post I
read was from someone who had just installed memory and was having
trouble with BIOS settings with mixed/matched mem sets; OR had just
enabled Parity/ECC check in their BIOS. Neither applies to me.

1. I do not have Parity/ECC check enabled in BIOS.
2. My BIOS settings have been the same for months.
3. This has all worked flawlessly for months...

HELP! THANK YOU!

 

[Guest]

Archived from groups: comp.sys.ibm.pc.hardware.chips,comp.os.msdos.misc,comp.sys.ibm.pc.hardware.misc (More info?)

In comp.sys.ibm.pc.hardware.misc stacey@nospam.com <Stacey> wrote:
> My system has been running great. Until this afternoon!

> I was troubleshooting a system card, reseating and so forth. Rebooted
> and the boot-up looked fine, counting through all RAM (512k) and loading
> device drivers to begin Windows... but just when I should have seen
> Win98 desktop I get:

> RAM PARITY ERROR - checking for segment - offending segment 0000.
> Hit F1 to ignore NMI, F2 to reboot.

> Neither key worked. Keyboard frozen. Curser blinks on black screen.

> I looked up this error in Google archives but virtually every post I
> read was from someone who had just installed memory and was having
> trouble with BIOS settings with mixed/matched mem sets; OR had just
> enabled Parity/ECC check in their BIOS. Neither applies to me.

> 1. I do not have Parity/ECC check enabled in BIOS.
> 2. My BIOS settings have been the same for months.
> 3. This has all worked flawlessly for months...

Do you have ECC RAM? If not, this might be a problem with the
mainboard. AFAIK the NMI (non maskable interrupt) is only used
for RAM parity errors, which are not possible except with
ECC RAM and at least error checking turned on in the BIOS.

I am not sure at the moment, but I think the CPU can also
trigger an NMI, e.g. for parity errors in a cache or when
overheating. Maybe you dislocated the CPU cooler?

Arno
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[Guest]

Archived from groups: comp.sys.ibm.pc.hardware.chips,comp.os.msdos.misc,comp.sys.ibm.pc.hardware.misc (More info?)

stacey@nospam.com said the following on 20/09/2004 01:36:

[snip]
> ... counting through all RAM (512k) ...

This says nothing, since the BIOS check is not a thorough check. I'm not
saying that it is your memory, but if you want to exclude it with more
certainty, you'd best use Memtest86 or Memtest86+ :

http://www.memtest86.com/
http://www.memtest.org/

--
Regards
Harrie