Alright, I have been fixing computers for some time now, I'm no expert but I help out people I know. Anyway, I am working on a Dell Inspiron 1318 that won't boot. He just wanted me to reinstall his vista 32bit home primium.
I wrote zeros to the entire drive then installed windows. The problem is when it tries to boot for the first time it gets to the loading windows screen then it blue screens, and does the same thing each subsequent time. So I retried drive wipe and reinstall with the same result. I tried another working HDD in the laptop and it did the exact same thing.
Here comes the fun part, I removed the DIMM from socket B and bingo, it starts right up. It runs fine until you try to restart or shut down. It will not reboot after the initial time it works, not even if you leave it for an hour. So I put DIMM B back in and removed DIMM A and, you guessed it, started fine once and would never reboot.
So.....I ran memtest86 for 7 hrs and it found NO errors (CPU cashe disabled). I put two sticks of RAM in that I know are good, and yet again it booted only one time.
It seams that anytime I change the amount of memory, or the configuration of the memory, I can get it to work one time and thats it. It did also work one time when I put both original DIMMs back in after having only one in on the previous boot atempt. I have run checkdisc several times also.
Any help would be greatly appreciated, Thanks
I wrote zeros to the entire drive then installed windows. The problem is when it tries to boot for the first time it gets to the loading windows screen then it blue screens, and does the same thing each subsequent time. So I retried drive wipe and reinstall with the same result. I tried another working HDD in the laptop and it did the exact same thing.
Here comes the fun part, I removed the DIMM from socket B and bingo, it starts right up. It runs fine until you try to restart or shut down. It will not reboot after the initial time it works, not even if you leave it for an hour. So I put DIMM B back in and removed DIMM A and, you guessed it, started fine once and would never reboot.
So.....I ran memtest86 for 7 hrs and it found NO errors (CPU cashe disabled). I put two sticks of RAM in that I know are good, and yet again it booted only one time.
It seams that anytime I change the amount of memory, or the configuration of the memory, I can get it to work one time and thats it. It did also work one time when I put both original DIMMs back in after having only one in on the previous boot atempt. I have run checkdisc several times also.
Any help would be greatly appreciated, Thanks