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Grex Hardware Item 195: Parity check 2
Entered by veek on Fri Oct 26 03:40:57 UTC 2007:

I am getting a parity check 2 message, with a Pentium 2.6 Gig processor
using 1 RAM stick 256MB. Is it a problem with the RAM. I enabled slow
boot and it checks the RAM, and there is no error at the count itself,
but after the count to 256MB is done i get: Parity Check 2

I googled and they say: "Parity error 2 is a error on an expansion
board"

Apparently, the chips on the mainboard/motherboard (BIOS ROM chip) give
a Parity error 1 xxxx:xxxx if they have a problem BUT what about PCI
boards, or video RAM from AGP etc..?? Aren't those boards expansion
boards too??
Any reading resources??

4 responses total.

#1 of 4 by gull on Mon Oct 29 18:17:30 2007:

It's probably a bad RAM stick.  RAM "expansion boards" don't really
exist anymore, but it used to be anything above 640K would be on a
separate board.

If you want to do more testing, try MEMTEST86+: http://www.memtest.org/

#2 of 4 by veek on Tue Oct 30 13:30:15 2007:

thanks jep. Re memtest: this was failing before the CD could be loaded..
Doesn't video memory form a part of RAM?? Is it checked by the BIOS??

#3 of 4 by gull on Wed Oct 31 01:10:31 2007:

It depends.  It used to be the two were completely separate, and the
BIOS didn't concern itself with video memory.  Now some low-end AGP
cards will take part of main RAM as their memory.

#4 of 4 by veek on Wed Oct 31 13:24:39 2007:

Thanks David. (excuse the jep snafu, was a bit tired - virii busting)

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