I know very little about hardware and have encountered problems that seem to
be something to do with RAM, but I'm not sure.

The same problems occur on 2 similar systems, both recently built with
second-user parts, except for the case and power supply, motherboard and
RAM, which were new.  Both systems run fine, until a second memory chip is
added, then several things can go wrong.

Problems occurring include:-

When booting from windows start-up disk:-

          Hard disk not recognised in BIOS;
          FDISK correctly reported an existing 8GB
          partition, but gave thetotal drive size as  either
          500MB or IGB.

After successfully partitioning and formatting hard disk:-

         Unable to install Win 98, which reported a
         damaged .CAB file (tried it with 2 different CD's)

With Win 98 installed (but no applications installed/running):-

          System hangs,
          Blue screen appears on shutdown.

Checked that the RAM chips were seated properly, and also swapped them.

System details are:-

     Processor: Celeron 400 Mhz
     Motherboard: Jetway J-7XAS
     Chipset: Intel 440LX
     BIOS: Award v.4.51P6
     Hard disk: 8.4 GB
     Memory:
           3 DIMM sockets
           168 pin 3.3v EDO or SDRAM PC-100 CL-3
            maximum 384 MB

Memory installed on the systems is: PC-133 non-parity (unbranded), 2 x 64MB

One system (minus one of the RAM chips) is currently running fine networked
(peer to peer) with two other PC's. Although haven't tried it with
applications installed/running yet.

Would changing to just one 128 MB chip (PC-100) in the first slot fix
things, or is it likely there is something a little more weird and wonderful
going on?

Another problem has just occurred.  On booting up, there was a disconcerting
noise, and a blue screen reporting a disk write error.  Windows loaded, but
reported Registry errors.  On restart, scandisk ran and identified bad
clusters in three different areas (non-data areas) during surface scan.

I don't know if this related, but the CD-ROM drive light was flickering all
the time - there was no disk in the drive.  However, this stopped after
unchecking the Auto Insert Notification option in Device Manager.

Hoping someone can help,

Many thanks,

Nicole Godwin.

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