Damaged Ram Slot
sfbayzfs
Active Member
Your advice solved a problem with the front memory slot on a Dell Latitude D500 not accepting any memory – had been trying to solve it for months & tried lots of different memory. Wedged a cocktail stick under the front edge of the access port & over the edge of the memory card, pointing up at about 10-15 degrees, so that closing the hatch. How to fix a faulty ram slot - posted in Internal Hardware: ok ive got this laptop, when i use a specific ram slot the screen dosnt work. Is there any way i could fix this problem? Second RAM slot is not working! I try put there 2 different DDR3 (original Samsung and Kingston). Both of them working fine in the first slot. But not working in the second one. Not working separate in second one, and not working together with the first slot. First slot separate working fin.
I have a lot of system building experience, and generally held the belief that bad RAM slots on motherboards are uncommon. The first one I encountered was a couple of years ago - I opened up a brand new ITX celeron board and I eventually discovered that one of the RAM slots was bad. The motherboard wouldn't boot with any RAM installed in one of the two RAM slots on the motherboard - remove RAM from that slot, and the system booted fine with RAM in the other slot only. (Of course I had been storing the board for long enough that it was out of warranty, but that's another story...) I suspected a bad solder joint or tin whisker somewhere on the bad RAM slot, but my soldering iron was misplaced a while ago, and a visual inspection of the underside of the board looked OK.
I have been testing more boards than I used to over the past year, and I have found a number of other boards which have bad RAM slots, so I was wondering how many bad RAM slots others here have run into on otherwise good motherboards.Also, has anyone ever successfully fixed a bad RAM slot, say with a solder reflow?
So far, in terms of failure modes with bad RAM slots, either any RAM in that slot is not recognized and ignored, or else the system won't boot with any RAM in that slot, either locking up during POST or black screen before POST, sometimes with beeps. Any time I have had memtest rack up errors, I have eventually traced it to an actual bad stick of RAM, but has anyone else noticed bad RAM slots causing other symptoms?On dual processor Xeon boards I have further findings:
- If the blue (primary) RAM slot in a channel is bad, that whole channel is unusable
- If the first blue slot for a CPU is bad, that CPU socket is unusable
- If a non-blue slot is bad, usually only that slot is bad
Bad Ram Slot Error
