On 5/1/2018 12:42 PM, Shadow wrote:
On Tue, 1 May 2018 12:13:44 -0500, Bill Anderson
wrote:

It began happening a few weeks ago -- I'd try to boot but before post
I'd hear four short beeps followed by the post chirp (different sound)
and then nothing. But it was an intermittent problem and I let it go
when rebooting seemed to solve things.

Then yesterday the problem stuck around through several attempted
reboots and I figured I'd better do something. So I looked up the error
beep table on the Asus website and found nothing about four short beeps.
Thanks, Asus. Then I branched out and learned Asus uses American
Megatrends' AMI BIOS, and that four beeps mean System Timer Failure,
which further means something's wrong with memory.

That was when I actually looked at BIOS to see how much memory I had and
I learned my four 8-gig memory sticks were producing not 32 gigs of
memory, but just 8 and change. In other words, only one stick was working.

So just now I removed all the memory and began replacing sticks one at a
time. At first I couldn't get past the four beeps, but I kept replacing
sticks in the D1 slot until one worked. (The manual says to put a
single stick in D1.) Then I put a stick in B1 as shown in the manual and
went right back to the four error beeps.

But I persevered, removing and re-inserting, and eventually I had two
working, then four, and now I'm booting nicely and BIOS shows total
memory at 32 gigs and change.

Funny things was -- the AIDA 64 Extreme system monitor software always
showed four slots filled with 8-gig sticks. It saw them when BIOS
didn't. Weird.

But things are fine now. I think. Maybe I oughta run Memtest just to be
sure...

Either one or more of the sticks were badly seated or you have
bad RAM.
Since it's usually an intermittent problem, I'd run Memtest
ASAP. Let it run overnight.
[]'s


I'm thinking three of the sticks, or maybe just one, affecting the
others, somehow became unseated. Maybe fluctuations in temperature over
time caused it, I dunno. I certainly hadn't been in there bumping
around. I learned there's a technique to seating the sticks on the
P9X79. Most memory slots I've seen over the years have locking levers on
both ends, but the P9X79 has a lock on only one end, with a passive
slotted block on the other. To get things seated, I had to press the
stick firmly in the slotted block end and then press hard on the locking
end to snap the stick in place. Pressing evenly across the stick seemed
not to work as well.

I did run one full pass of Memtest and saw no errors. Maybe I'll let it
run all night as you suggest, but I've found if there are going to be
Memtest errors, they'll pop up long before one full pass is completed.

--
Bill Anderson

I am the Mighty Favog