AndyM1981
Experienced Member
Hi Everyone,
I've been a computer enthusiast my entire life, however the last couple of years have seen me catch the retro PC bug rather badly. Luckily for me I kept much of my old hardware, and some of the things that I don't have I've managed to snag at thrift stores and the like. A couple of months ago I was at my parents place and dug out our first computer along with the monitor and printer and have spent the last little while restoring it to how I remembered it as a kid and playing with it again which has been a ton of fun. The forums here have been an invaluable resource over the years, however I can't seem to find anything that relates to my problem.
Once I got it working I decided to add a bit more memory in the form of an Intel Above Board/AT that I managed to snag off Ebay to help smooth out Windows/286 performance. The board is fully populated with 1664 KB of RAM. Rows 0 and 1 have 64K DIPs while the rest are filled with 256K DIPs.
The board is installed and mostly working except for an error when EMM.SYS loads stating that I have defective chips on the board and it initializes only to 1536KB. I've run the Intel confidence tool numerous times, including one session with 10 consecutive runs and all the memory chips come back fine. The tool includes an option to set the first two rows as 64K chips while the rest are 256K, as is installed on my board. In this configuration it passes. If I select all 256K chips the tool naturally says all the 64K chips are defective.
This leads me to believe that the EMM.SYS driver (the one included with Windows/286 2.1) is having fits with the mixed memory sizes. I've tried an older version of the driver from an image of the original installation disk with the thought that it might deal with the mixed chip sizes better, but it results in a different error telling me that my machine is not completely AT compatible (Packard Bell 286 running at 12 MHz).
It's not an earth shattering problem, but the error on startup is annoying and I would rather not move chips around on a board this old if I can avoid it.
Have any of you encountered this problem before and have any kind of solution?
Looking forward to contributing here moving forward!
I've been a computer enthusiast my entire life, however the last couple of years have seen me catch the retro PC bug rather badly. Luckily for me I kept much of my old hardware, and some of the things that I don't have I've managed to snag at thrift stores and the like. A couple of months ago I was at my parents place and dug out our first computer along with the monitor and printer and have spent the last little while restoring it to how I remembered it as a kid and playing with it again which has been a ton of fun. The forums here have been an invaluable resource over the years, however I can't seem to find anything that relates to my problem.
Once I got it working I decided to add a bit more memory in the form of an Intel Above Board/AT that I managed to snag off Ebay to help smooth out Windows/286 performance. The board is fully populated with 1664 KB of RAM. Rows 0 and 1 have 64K DIPs while the rest are filled with 256K DIPs.
The board is installed and mostly working except for an error when EMM.SYS loads stating that I have defective chips on the board and it initializes only to 1536KB. I've run the Intel confidence tool numerous times, including one session with 10 consecutive runs and all the memory chips come back fine. The tool includes an option to set the first two rows as 64K chips while the rest are 256K, as is installed on my board. In this configuration it passes. If I select all 256K chips the tool naturally says all the 64K chips are defective.
This leads me to believe that the EMM.SYS driver (the one included with Windows/286 2.1) is having fits with the mixed memory sizes. I've tried an older version of the driver from an image of the original installation disk with the thought that it might deal with the mixed chip sizes better, but it results in a different error telling me that my machine is not completely AT compatible (Packard Bell 286 running at 12 MHz).
It's not an earth shattering problem, but the error on startup is annoying and I would rather not move chips around on a board this old if I can avoid it.
Have any of you encountered this problem before and have any kind of solution?
Looking forward to contributing here moving forward!