Thanks guys
For those of you wanting to know what happened, here's the full story. I know that many of you would probably have solved this a lot more quickly than me but personally, this meant a lot to me.
Ok, if you've read
my previous threads about this you'd know that I bought an additional 2 x 1GB RAM for my computer and started getting BSOD failures every time I booted up - my graphics drivers kept kicking up a message about nvlddmkm.dll or something and then rebooting. Well, naturally I went to the NVIDIA forums and found pages and pages of posts from people complaining about this error. I deduced that this was some sort of problem with NVIDIA then, especially when Vista gave me an error note to say that they were aware of this problem but NVIDIA have done nothing to rectify it.
A lot of people suggested it may have something to do with having all 4 RAM slots full, others suggested that it was a problem with 32 bit Vista. Well, I took care of the Vista issue by installing the 64 bit version of Vista Premium with SP1 (which I my retail key entitled me to for free - and thanks go to LordofLA) but this didn't solve the problem. So it must be the slots, I thought. I bought 2 x 2GB of RAM from Crucial and installed that.
Bam! BSOD of death exactly like before! Well that ruled out the two major potential sources. Now what's weird is that the 4 x 1GB didn't show up fully in the BIOS, something like 3x9xx,xxx KB. I kind of expected that, but I was shocked that the 2 x 2GB also showed up as3x9xx,xxx KB instead of showing the full 4,xxx,xxx whatever it is KB. So the only thing I could think of blaming was my BIOS - perhaps the BIOS was creating a problem which was screwing my NVIDIA drivers? When I booted without the NVIDIA drivers installed, Vista loaded fine (but no accelerated graphics obviously!).
So anyway, a good way to fix a BIOS problem is obviously to flash it. Now, having not had a floppy drive for about 7 years, booting to a floppy was out of the question but MSI have a handy "Live Update" program. Firstly I tried the online update which went badly from the start and got it's knickers in a twist so I tried the downloadable version which installed ok but just kept coming up with error messages. When I finally got it up and running it just wouldn't show anything to do with BIOS updates, only some crappy utilities which I saw no use for. So my only option left was to install it manually, so I downloaded the BIOS update but not having a floppy drive meant I couldn't boot from that and had to try something else. This update came with a windows installer, which although a bit dodge, I didn't have many other options so I tried this. Lo and behold, it just refused to work on Vista x64. I then tried creating a bootable CD - I managed to do this, but then it woundn't read the BIOS file from my C:\ drive, which is NTFS. I then burned the BIOS files onto a CD, which I could read from DOS. However, the program just refused to work without backing up the original BIOS - something which I couldn't do onto the CD. At this point I lost 3 pounds in weight simply from pulling hair out. Eventually I hit on my last option - reinstall XP 32 bit, download and run the BIOS updater from that.
I managed to find an old 30GB hard drive at work, so I "borrowed" that, unplugged my current HD, plugged in the old one, wiped it, installed XP but then found I had no LAN drivers! No LAN drivers, no internet! So I had to pull out all my computer stuff (we've just moved house) and I eventually found the XP drivers for my built-in network card. I installed those, hooked up to the internet and then installed the MSI "Live Update" thing. I ran it, and lo and behold, it found a new BIOS, then installed it!!! The rest, as some say, is history - I plugged my old HD back it, got it up and running no problem, then put the 2 x 2GB RAM in, and finally, after a good few weeks, all 4GB of RAM was recognised by my motherboard and by Vista.
So there we go. It felt a bit like a needless marathon, but I was just so pleased to have got my RAM working! I imagine some of you would have been able to solve this sooner, but this was cool for me, so please don't be too mean
Anyway, sorry for the weird "Yesssssssssssssssss!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!" thread, I think my excitement got the better of me, and thanks to everyone for their advice.
And wanna know what's really weird :lick: ? Carpo guessed exactly what it was...
still say its a board/bios issue - poss a driver kicking up due to bios/board
