G5 Power Mac - Disappearing RAM

[cemdata]

My trusty old G5 DP, which funtioned flawlessly for 5 years with 8 1GB sticks of RAM, but currently relegated to file server tasks, recently choked on a system update. In reinstalling the system I discovered that it was only seeing 7.5 GB of RAM, seeing 2 of the 1 GB sticks as 512 MB.

I removed the RAM, did some minor cleaning, then replaced it and rebooted. The relatively luxurious 7.5 GB was now being seen as 3 GB. Removed and reseated all of the RAM again, now it's only showing up as 2 GB, showing 4 of the slots empty and the RAM it sees is showing up as 512 MB.

Any thoughts?

 

[MacForScience]

Could be bad RAM or could be a bad Motherboard. Those would be the likely culprits. It is rather unlikely that it is software. Also a G5 at this point is definitely at the point where you expect hardware failure to occur.

Cheers

 

[cemdata]

Having handled hundreds of pieces of RAM without frying any, I tend to believe that the motherboard is at fault. Very bad timing, as it seems all my machines are dying at once. Only machine running properly on my network is a PC. How gloomy is that?

Looking now to do an incremental upgrade to a post-2009 Xeon machine to handle primary workstation duty, even though the PC is a blindingly fast i7 quad, all my daily software is Mac, and I'd rather be flogged than resort to using the PC for daily tasks, as it's relegated now to (very handily) running a server in Fedora via VMWare.

Hoping to score a decent Nehalem or Westmere powered Mac Pro, but why oh why do they have to be so expensive? No answer necessary, just grousing. What should I be looking for in such a unit that will allow primary use, enjoy minimal or no predictable obsolescence, to transparently run Linux under VMWare Fusion and still have a powerful daily use machine?

 

[havokalien]

Heat gun

If you have time and take it easy, a heat gun could let you reflow the backside of the ram slots (known issue) and you could repair.

 

[widerstand]

Once youl'll arrive to the no memory inserted boot led-light, then it's time to reflow the main memory controller ic under the big heatsink, sitting the opposite side of the memory banks...
it's a damned big board, and very hard to work with, has a ton of copper in it...

 

[havokalien]

I second that

I agree with his last post for sure.