recently there has been this problem that has been getting more frequent, my computer just randomly freezes up/blackscreens and then fails to post when i do a hard restart. this doesn’t resolve itself until after i open it up and play musical chairs with the ram for a bit.
shit that i have tried:
- swapped the ram around to different slots. sometimes it works, sometimes it doesn’t
- cleaned out the case
- wd40’d the ram pins (helped with the posting but seems to have increased crash frequency, not enough data to tell for sure)
no idea where to begin with this one, can’t tell if it’s a motherboard or a ram issue or something else entirely. the sticks are of differing sizes and manufacture so that may also be an issue. would give specs but the thing just died on me in the middle of posting this and i can’t boot in just yet. motherboard is a supermicro x9 something server board.
i was on 6 sticks, i think i have narrowed the candidates down to 3 stable sticks, 2 unstable, and 1 definitely busted
problem is the stable sticks only work in certain slots and even then uptime is not great
one of the unstable sticks is brand new, makes me think that it got destroyed by being in one of the bad slots
a big problem is that i have 16 slots for ram and it’s a total pain in the ass to test all of them
if sticks of ram are only working in certain slots its entirely possible the IC that controls the ram is shot.
Recently had this happen on an old dual xeon setup, rendered half of my 192GB of ram unusable and was causing problems exactly like what you’re describing.
Does the mobo show the sticks as inserted upon bootup?