Help! recentrly obtained 1024mb of dimm ddr 133 ram in the form of two 512 chips, Great! installed them both, alongside a 128 i already had, the 128 is only 100 though. It caused windows to lockup at the second splash screen (the bottom bar froze) so i switched off, took out the 128, thinking it was just a frequency conflict, restarted, same thing.. odd i think to myself, so i shut down, take out the 512 in dimm bay 2, and reboot again, this time straight through the post, skiped scandisk, through both splashes,
and right into "windows has detected corrupt registry files, and is restoring from a recent backup", oh bugger i hear you say, oh bugger indeed, still, it did its stuff, rebooted my machine, into windows, with a decidedly old, los res desktop, installed a few devices itself (3dfx, few system devices) and told me to reboot, i did, came back up lovley. Fantastic i thought, having talked to another techy friend, i decided the reason the 2nd 512 was causing me to hang, was more than likley a bios issue, being blessed with a semi decent motherboard, i nipped over to their site, and downloaded the flash bios update, installed it, rebooted into dos to make a backup (as recoomneded by th guide) typed in:
c:\>a:
and recvied the error:
General read error while reading drive a:
abort, retry, or fail?
oh &*$% i said, and whipped out the old screw driver to inspect the floppy drive, checked the ide, power and socket condition, all fine, oh well i went, and procedded to whip a brand new sony 1.44 out of my mates machine, stuck it in, connected it up, and tried again.
same damned thing, booted into windows, checked the performance tab under "my computer"-> properties and see that drive A is using ms-dos compatabilty mode, fanfrickentastic, after a few choice phrases like "you fing heap of bloody fecies, i'm gonna throw u out the fing window, i set about sorting this one out. and to my despair, i can't remeber how. YAY! great fun ain't it, can anyone, please, help me out? Cheers
Padd - Technician (roflmao - yes seriously!)

Siberdude
siberdude@settlers.co.uk
http://settlers.co.uk

Does your Mainboard support DDR? Did you try rebooting with the original 128 meg in it only?

James Collins
Systems Support Engineer
A+, MCP

email: butchrecon@skyenet.net

Please let us (Tek-tips members) know if the solutions we provide are helpful to you. Not only do they help you but they may help others.

*smiles* Aye my board supports up to 1.5gb of 133 ddr ram.
Thanks for the reply though. Anyone else?
Quick update:
have re-installed windoews to no avail, nasty floppy drive is still runnning in ms-dos compatability mode.

Siberdude
siberdude@settlers.co.uk
http://settlers.co.uk

I dont believe the DDR ram and the regular 100 ram play well together, take out the 128 reg 100 ram and try again.

I was handed a PC that is stuck in DOS mode.  When it boots up it works fine displays the windows 98 and then gets in a loop trying to boot up in windows. When I hit enter it just continues in the loop.  I am not sure the autoexec.bat file is set up correctly. The config.sys is set up like the old time computers.  

IT will run in Safe Mode, but then the cd-rom drive is not recognized.

Please advise.
Thanks

Try a virus scan I was reading about a virus causing msdos compatability mode yesterday.There are several online scanners that can be used.

I have a problem.
My Floppy drive isn't working. When I right click on MY COMPUTER, it says 'Drive A is using MS-DOS compatibility mode file system'. On some internet sites it says to delete the lines in config.sys and autoexec.bat but I dont know what lines to delete or edit! Somebody help please!