RAM suddenly disappeared

[617arg]

I've been having some issues with my early 2008 Mac Pro these last few months. A thread is here: https://forums.macrumors.com/threads/934837/

It turned out one stick of RAM was bad. I sent it back to Transintl and I'm still waiting for them to replace it.

I have been running with the remaining 10gb of RAM (albeit a bit slower). Today however, my machine suddenly turned off again. I held down 'option' during the restart to get it going again and now the slots with the remaining 8gb from Transintl show up as 'empty' in "About this Mac". Any idea what could be going on here? To suddenly lose 16gb of RAM kind of hurts My machine is essentially useless for me for work now, and I have a feeling Transintl won't be replacing any of it any time soon (it's been about a month and I'm still waiting for the first set I sent back to them through an RMA.....)

Thanks for any help.............

 

[wordoflife]

Wow, that stinks!
I assume the RAM is just bad, and it's dying as time passes.

 

[wywern209]

wow. i guess you got some really bad sticks of ram. maybe they were from the same batch? try to take the ram out and put it back in. maybe it got unseated somehow. it might be dead though. At this point, i think you cna demand your money back due to the extensive lemons you got. seriously. 16gb of bad ram? take your business elsewhere. other companies make ECC ram for the mac pro too right? kingston, corsair, mushkin, crucial etc. i haven't even heard of transintl.

EDIT: i think it is fairly hard for ram to go bad that easily. its due to shoddy manufacturing. i have a dell computer(that albeit doesn't use ECC ram) that is 8 years old, still have original ram sticks. works like a charm.

 

[617arg]

I just reseated the RAM and restarted the computer. There are (2)-4gb sticks on riser A and (2)-1gb sticks on riser B. Riser A now has a red LED lit and only the (2)-1gb sticks show up in "About this Mac".

Question: Does this mean the RAM is bad or is it the riser?

Thanks again..

 

[617arg]

OK. It looks like it is the RAM and not the board (I swapped the RAM and the LED lit up on the other riser). It seems crazy for all the RAM to go within a month like this. I hope Transintl honors their lifetime warranty.........

 

[617arg]

Just got off the phone with Transintl. They were very nice and immediately offered to replace the RAM under their lifetime warranty. He did say that it is very strange for this to happen. I do wonder if constant stress or heat wears down the memory. I'm hoping the first set I sent back gets to me soon. This is making me consider keeping a spare pair of RAM modules around in case of emergencies like this.