Memory Parity Error...System Halted

[Louis Mello]

I am trying to resurrect a 5 year old homebuilt P1-133, Intel Endeavor motherboard, 96mb non-parity EDO RAM, running Win95.

The hard drive was reformatted, and during reloading Win95 from floppys, I encountered errors saying that there were problems with the High Memory management and HIMEM.sys. After giving up for the night, the next morning the system allowed me to fully load Win 95 but during the initial reboot I get the Blue Screen error "Memory Parity Error Detected...System Halted", and I get this message every time the GUI tries to boot.

I have checked the BIOS, the CMOS battery, and all internal connections. I have also tried different combinations of the RAM (32, 64, and 96mb). For a little while during the trials of different RAM combinations the BIOS startup wouldn't even come up on the screen but now it does again and I have the 96mb installed and all BIOS defaults set.

What else can I try? Thanks in advance to all who try to help.

[BigBlue66]

Hi,

You most likely have a bad memory stick. Or, you are mixing non-parity with parity memory. Have you just purchased one of those memory sticks lately?

Make certain that all memory sticks are the same, i.e., non-parity.

Try using just one memory stick at a time. You may be able to find the bad memory stick this way. However, if you just recently bought a new memory stick, and everything was running fine before, then either the new memory stick is bad, or incompatible with the old memory stick.

Also, any time you make changes to the memory amount, such as adding or removing sticks, on that machine you must enter the BIOS setup during bootup. Don't make any changes, just Save and Exit. This will rewrite the CMOS to the new memory amount. This might possibly cause the errors you're receiving as well.

Good luck.

Big Blue 66


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