PowerMac G5 Dual 2ghz crashing

[eric]

I just got my G5 I picked up at VCF MW for $30 up and running - needed a new PSU which I met up with @ScutBoy to pick up recently.

I completely skipped the G5 era so I'm not as familiar with these and how they work, so any tips appreciated.

Symptoms:

Bank 0/1 of the ram are never detected, but the other 6 are (have 8 1gb dimms, only 6gb shows)

Crashes randomly after a period of time. (screen artifacts, or kernel panic)

--

I've ran tech tool pro 4 memory test, but they go so quick I dont think they are full tests - currently doing a full suite to check the drives too (they're old 1tb drives, could be the issue too)

Other utlities to test the RAM more thoroughly or thoughts on what to look at?

Running Sorbet 10.5 and another partition with 10.4

 

[Certificate of Excellence]

Hit the affected ram slots with a hot hair dryer for a few minutes, then boot up and see if the full ram is detected. If they are, likely its not the ram and is instead the slot that would need to be reflowed.

IIRC the ram has to be in pairs, so you can remove the affected slot/pair and see if stability returns.

 

[eric]

Will try, though i may just live with 6gb as getting this motherboard out does not look fun to re-work those memory slots.

Currently running the PowerMac Apple Hardware Test - found this cool site that has all the Apple Hardware Test CD's - https://github.com/upekkha/AppleHardwareTest Very loud and warming my office quite a bit!

Also stumbled across this - a memory tester for OSX - get crashes randomly while using it so memory is the likely culprit - https://www.kelleycomputing.net/Rember/

Now to find the bad stick(s)

 

[Certificate of Excellence]

Pair positioning is:

slot 4
slot 3
slot 2
slot 1
-------
slot 1
slot 2
slot 3
slot 4

You install and remove the ram in pairs starting with slot 1.

 

[eric]

You install and remove the ram in pairs starting with slot 1.

Unfortuently slot 1 sticks never show up. And I can only boot if i have slots 2-4 populated (not just 2 or 3 or 4). testing combinations now till i can find a way to narrow down the issue.