Mac Pro Restarts when knocked/touched!

[rolymacpro]

Hello All

I have an early 2008 Mac Pro 3,1
2 x 2.8 GHz Quad-Core Intel Xeon.
I bought it with 2GB of RAM and upped that myself to 6GB. RAM came from crucial.com/uk

My mac is having some trouble and is restarting or freezing if knocked (even slightly). I had a tricky time with it today and have moved it from the floor and onto my desk. After starting it up again I attempted to plug in my external speakers into the jack above the ethernet ports and it restarted again....

I checked my about this mac and it informed me that I only have 2 GB of RAM present and in the system profiler under memory it's telling me that my DIMM risers that should have Ram in them are empty-even after a restart (that time I asked it to).

So, I clearly have a problem, but don't quite know where best to start. I'm thinking I should remove, clean and re instal the RAM and see what happens. I would appreciate any advice, I'm not sure if the restarting is linked to bad RAM or something else.......could it be something to do with the RAM because of the restart when plugging in the jack at the back of the tower, given the jack output and the memory chips are located fairly close to each other-and that some of the RAM isn't registering?

thanks
Roly

 

[hfg]

If it is purely physical shock that restarts it, that would certainly suggest something isn't firmly plugged in somewhere. The fact that you are "missing" a bunch of RAM would certainly suggest the riser boards. I would unplug both risers (several times to clean the contacts), reseat the memory modules, reseat any PCI boards, reseat all disk drive sleds, and make sure the power plug is firmly inserted.

Hope that fixes it ... because if not it may have some serious problems.

Good luck!




-howard