extra ram added, pc doesnt work. Extra ram removed, still doesnt work? wtf
 

Extra ram added besides the old ram. The extra ram was exactly the same as the old, so this is not the problem.

Started up the pc and it doesnt work anymore. Light goes on, but thats it.

So i removed the new ram, so now the only ram in it is the old one i have used for many years.

Started up the pc, and still just the light on but not starting up! What the fuck is this? I just put new ram in it and removed it again. And now its completely dead? What is causing this?

Remove the cmos battery, put it back in, reboot. See if that helps anything.

If possible, try the new ram in another pc to see if the ram actually work.

you fucked up your motherboard, happens, actually happened to me too.

Could be the first two replies but also double check to make sure you didn't knock a connector loose somewhere or perhaps an adjacent memory module. Happens all the time.

I just went through this with one of my pc's. It ended up being the mother board and I bought a new pc cause I didn't have time to mess with it. Do you get any beeps when you start the pc with no ram in it?

jesus christ. How did i fuck up the motherboard? And without ram it doesnt gives any beeps. It does nothing, with or without ram.
Fans spin though. But thats it.

Can you open your cd rom? You may not have grounded yourself when you messed with the ram. My fan was working but the board would not get hot at all and the cd/dvd roms would not open. I had no beep codes or monitors either.

no beeps? either something's disconnected or the motherboard's gone.

exactly the same here. And i did ground myself before replacing it etc. Read about it before i did the upgrade. Well, downgrade now obviously.

what a fucking headache this is. Is there any way to fix this at all? I really dont feel like putting every program, every little thing i use on another pc. This had everything i need on it...

did you disconnect the power cord before you put in the ram?

yes

by the way, the little green light on the motherboard is still on... does that mean the mobo isnt fried?

damn that sucks dude.

It sucks so bad when this happens :( Sorry it happened to you. I took mine into a couple PC places in Tennessee while I was visiting my parents and they all told me the same thing. I would have to replace the MB and there was a possibility the processor could have gone as well. By the time I could order the parts and have them put in I was headed back to North Carolina. I just ended up buying a new pc cause I was sick of dealing with my old one. I just built it less than 6 months ago too. I don’t think there is any way to recover the programs unfortunately. You can swap your HD into a new pc and use it as the slave to keep the data but the programs are tough to recover cause of the registry files.

Yea my light was still on as well.

green light means it gets power, nothing else

Try with one stick of RAM. First pull power, remove the CMOS battery and try to power on.

Also, you were wearing a static strap, right?

thanks for clearing it up people... ill be shopping for a new one then. This thing is old anyway. FUCK!!!

You simply put the HD in a new pc and boot it up. Everything will be there.

no, i didnt even know what that is until now (google images). Tried it without battery still no startup

ive got 2 physical HD's, 1 is the c (windows) and d drive (partitioned) and one is with alot of files, my huge music collection etc.
So if i get a new pc and replace that c drive with this one, i will be able to use it like nothing happened? That would be perfect.

I meant pull the power cord, pull the battery and without hooking power back up try to turn on the computer. The capacitors are still holding a little charge that can prevent the BIOS from being reset.

There's also usually a reset jumper on a mobo that you can move over to the reset position and briefly power up.

This is the most likely answer.

If it's really old did the PC speaker ever recently work? Sometimes they go bad and that could explain no beeps with no RAM (and it usually won't POST with no RAM anyway depending on the computer). For the hell of it I'd probably try blowing compressed air in the area of the ram slots (to unseat and pickup any dust) then putting in the old RAM module. After that I'd say screw it and get a new one if I already tried the other stuff people mentioned.

For some reason I could not get my programs and had to reload them all :(

You won't be able to just slap in the old drive with the OS and expect it to boot up. You'll have to install windows again but if you drop your existing drives into a computer that is already running windows you MAY be able to use the programs installed on it without reinstalling.

Either way your data will be safe though, don't sweat that.

Maybe I'm missing something - he should be able to boot up just fine. He'll need to reset the BIOS on the new box, then install the correct motherboard drivers (and other hardware of course), but it should boot, as long as he adds the drive with the active boot partition in the correct location on the bus.

tried everything now. Also the no power cord trick but that didnt do anything. Looks like its fucked. Nice.

Sure, you can go through all that and make it work. I was assuming it was over his head though.

You never know what you might run into. I just had to install windows on an older computer that had no driver disks with it. The regular Win XP disk didn't have the appropriate driver for the disk controller so I couldn't even begin to install Windows. To top it off it was a Soyo motherboard and Soyo is gone. I had to search old repair forums for over an hour to find a working download for that driver. :1orglaugh

Make sure the old RAM is seated in their sockets all the way; perhaps one or more of them came loose while you were putting in the new RAM.

The number of beeps is an indication of what's wrong. How many beeps are you hearing? Google BIOS beeps for explanation of what the various beep sequences possibly mean.

Also, another thing to try is take out the old RAM and put in the new RAM only - see if that works.

It's possible the timing of the new chips is different than that of the old and the CMOS is confused - hence, the suggestions by some to take out the CMOS battery. But don't do that yet - try the new RAM by itself first. If that works, then use the new RAM only, and buy more that's the same brand from the same supplier to add to it.

Ron

Addendum:

What kind of RAM did you remove? And what kind did you buy?

DDR2 DDR3, etc? ... memory size? ... what brand? ... and ram timing / speed?

Knowing that might help narrow down the issue.

If you do remove the CMOS battery - first try the new ram by itself, but if no good (I neglected to mention this), try the old ram by itself.

Ron

Yep, same here.

Had a machine that mirrored that O.P. exactly. I could never put more than a 2GB RAM stick into the boxe despite it being able to hold 8GB because MOBO was fucked. Since it was some secondary server, it was not worth the hassle to screw around with it to fix.

dang! without any memosticks the box shud respond with a fast beep-beep-beep to point out the memo is missing ... not a single sound on boot means you killed it :2 cents:

you probably used the OS that was preinstalled on the new pc to boot?

old drive with OS in a new pc = works fine... Done it dozens of times. The windows install will detect the different hardware (other grafix card and things like that) and you may need to install some drivers afterwards to get better performance, but it will work.


That doesn't make any sense. The OS is installed on the HD. If you take a HD with one OS out of the box and put another HD with another OS on it in the box, the box has no way of knowing that.

Switch the hard drive into a new PC and it'll boot up like normal except it'll be faster and it'll be new but all your software will be there just like it was on your old one.

definitely sounds like you killed the motherboard. That sucks.

thanks for clearing it up u-bob and moeloubani. Will do that for sure :)

I guess that's what I did :( I wish I would have asked GFY before I had to reinstall all my programs. I asked the guy at the local pc shop here if it would work and he told me I could only recover the data :( Boo Hoo

That doesn't always work, sometimes windows won't boot because of old hard drive controller drivers installed. The only way to make sure it will boot is to replace a few drivers with generic ones first but it's too late for the OP to do that.

put it in the oven. get drunk.