RAM upgrade disaster

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RAM upgrade disaster

So I bought this 256mb ram card to put it in my friends g3 400mhz for him. I put it in and removed one of the cards that was in there, and put it in. Worked great. system profiler detected it fine. Then i noticed that the card i pulled from the original unit was the 96mb card I meant to leave in, not the 64mb I meant to pull. SO to get 350mb instead of 320mb, i switched the cards. Powered up and it made a horrible speaker grinding rendition of the boot up chime, then makes the beeping noise and the power button flashes white. Did the logic board get fried somehow? Thats what I figure happened, but how?

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You're talking about an iMac,

You're talking about an iMac, right? I just had that experience. It's bad RAM, if I remember correctly, or incompatible. Not all kinds of SDRAM are going to work in that machine. I've never heard of a 96mb stick of RAM before. Those sounds don't mean it's fried. You can try reseating the RAM again, but it sounds like odd RAM to me. If it works with the 256, just dump the 96mb. Another 256mb would be so much better, anyway. Convince him of maxing to 512mb instead, maybe. OS X is so much happier at 512. Used SDRAM shouldn't be very expensive these days.

Out of curiosity, where are you? I've been guessing Italy. Brula sounds Italian for some reason.

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One more very important thing!

Shucks, I forgot to mention. Was he already in OS X? You didn't stick the 256mb in and then upgrade him to OS X, I hope. His iMac's firmware MUST (!) be updated to the current version before upgrading. If you try to upgrade an early iMac to OS X without the upgrade, then you will fry the machine.

Here:
http://docs.info.apple.com/article.html?artnum=58174

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Now none of the cards work in

Now none of the cards work in any combination, and the sound coming from the speakers seems like it sounded like a logic board malfunction. The other thing is I may have forgotten to unplug the cord on the second time, meaning I may have touched pins while powered on.

Actually Im in Washington but brulaheliko is esperanto.

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Man, I wish I could remember

Man, I wish I could remember exactly what I did in the same situation. It was an iMac I found about a month ago which was stalling in it's OS 9 boot, and in my haste to check it out, I removed its original harddrive and put a harddrive in it with OS X installed and then got that sound, so I slapped myself for forgetting about the firmware update. Then I replaced the motherboard and started it up and the machine worked fine. Then I checked it's original harddrive and saw that that harddrive had OS 10.1 installed in a very strange way, so it seemed OS X wasn't the original problem, so I put back the original motherboard and left the CD drive disconnected,and it started up, and I saw that the firmware was updated already, and for awhile came to the conclusion that it was a bad CD drive, but I can't remember exactly what happened after that, but I did get the motherboard working again, so it wasn't a fatal situation. Sorry, maybe my memory will come back during a shower or something.

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Cool. I had 10.2.8 installed

Cool. I had 10.2.8 installed as well as 9.1 or 9.2 on it. There was a problem with os x and he could only boot to os9, So i installed the new ram, reformatted and partitioned the HD, reinstalled both OS's and then ran updater. and then realized I had the wrong card. Thats when I tried to switch em out, and I may have left it plugged in at this point. Note that the 96 and 64mb cards both worked fine before, and the 256 and 64 worked fine together.

Jon
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The update is needed for 10.2

The update is needed for 10.2 and up, IIRC. Older versions don't cause the self destructing video on slot-loaders I think.

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Im pretty sure it wasn't a fi

Im pretty sure it wasn't a firmware issue. Os X 10.2.8 ran fine on it before for a couple of months. I need to know if I have to replace the logic board. Is there a way to see if it fried for sure?

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