As I have mentioned before, I have barely enough memory to run OSX, so I haven't installed it yet. Yes, when I said 'Classic', I meant MacOS 9.2.2.

I just tried booting the mac, and got the flashing '?' again. I didn't change the memory since I shut her down. Makes me think the HD is toast. This is the first time that I have tried booting the new system through the KVM. That couldn't be causing this problem could it? I am going to shut my other computer down and try without the KVM and the original memory back in place. At least I was able to back everything up first.

I replaced the original RAM, and now she boots fine, both with and without the KVM. Why would memory problems cause the computer to not see the hard drive? I am probably going to send this memory back, because it is obviously quite flakey. It could be that the HD is starting to die, but wouldn't Norton catch that?

Well, I tried the memory in an old Athalon 550 running Debian Linux that has known good 'old school' PC100 ram. The Athalon couldn't see the new ram, no matter what I did in the BIOS. I am going to try this one last time, using a vendor from Made4Mac. I know I waited too long to upgrade, but I didn't realize this would be such a hassle.

Well, third try is defintely not the charm. The computer still won't boot with anything except for one stick of RAM. I tried all of the slots, again. Sometimes, I get the flashing ?, sometimes I don't. When I contacted the vendor of the last set of memory that I tried, they were very suprised that it didn't work, and did not recognise the symptoms. My only guess is that there must be something wrong with the motherboard. Does anybody out there know of any hardware test utilities out there that run on either Classic or Linux?

Okay, this is getting ridiculous. I found an old stick of 128MB memory that was in the Athalon machine when I first bought it. Just for grins, I plugged it into the Mac, and whadya know, this memory works! The machine boots fine, and the system profiler now says that I have 384 MB of RAM. I wouldn't be suprised if the last two vendors that I dealt with get their memory from the same supplier. I may need to find a hardware junkyard to get memory that actually works, because the new stuff out there is obviously bogus.

I just noticed on the invoice for the new RAM that it is listed as being 'PC100/PC133'. The memory itself says PC133 on it. Back when I was upgrading my Athalon machine, I had the same problem- vendors were trying to sell PC 133 memory as PC 100. I had to try 2 different vendors before I was actually able to get memory to work in that machine. Also, back then I heard tell that the 'dual-speed' PC133/PC100 memory often did not work in older machines that only used PC 100 RAM. I think that might be my problem now.

Well, I was finally able to find a 512MB stick that works for my machine. I had to pay more than $100.00 at a local computer upgrade shop for a stick of factory OEM RAM. He also had a 256MB stick that caused me problems. I couldn't boot at first, and had to shuffle the RAM a bit before it would work. When it did boot, I had an error message saying that the built-in memory test had detected a problem, and that I should consult a service technician. The system profiler showed the 256MB stick as being only 128MB. That one is not worth the hassle, so it is going back to the shop. Anyhow, I have 896MB of ram, which should be enough for Tiger, knock on wood.