BIOS Caching Problem

J-M · #1 01-25-2005, 02:54 AM

In an attempt to upgrade the RAM on my old 300mhz HP Pavilion 8275 machine, I recieved a "blue screen of death" which basically told me I should disable BIOS caching/shadowing on the system.

Only problem is that in BIOS there is no option to enable or disable the caching! I tried checking for BIOS updates but there are none for my cpu with Windows 2000 professional as an operating system.

The error I'm getting is: Page_Fault_In_NonPaged_Area

Any ideas of how to fix this??

Thanks in advance.

Disk_Contented · #2 01-25-2005, 08:17 PM

You don't look for a bios compatible with win 2k. you just get the latest one.
I think you may be adding more ram than the machine can cope with, or the ram is mismatched.

J-M · #3 01-26-2005, 09:31 AM

The RAM is all correct and everything, I made sure of that, and BIOS recognized it... just that turning off of the cache and shadowing that's the problem; to get rid of that nasty blue screen error. Updating BIOS might not even fix this if it doesn't include these options. I figure that maybe the update would include these options.

I went to hp.com to check out the BIOS updates for my cpu and they only list updates for XP, 98, and 95. Are you sure that if I downloaded one of the updates for the other operating systems, that it would work and not screw things up?

And, if a updated version of BIOS doesn't include these options is there a way to manually disable caching/shadowing in a different way?

prs4u · #4 01-26-2005, 06:17 PM

J-M,

I agrree with Disk_Contented - but the latest BIOS cannot guarantee a positive result. Are you willing to take a risk?

If not check out your mother board on the internet and even drop the manufacturer a line explaining before you do an BIOS update, sometimes the manufacturers can be helpful if in doubt.

J-M · #5 01-28-2005, 03:00 AM

All I really need to do is disable BIOS caching/shadowing somehow. I did some looking around and found out there are no BIOS upgrades for my cpu. What I need to know is how to disable BIOS caching! The option is not in BIOS as far as I see. Are there any ideas on how to do this? Anything?

My cpu is running Windows 2000 Professional SP4, my mobo is an Asus KL97XV, and my BIOS is PhoenixBIOS 4.0 Release 6.0.9. Help!

NiTrous · #6 01-28-2005, 05:00 AM

in the bios there shld be something called 'System BIOS Cacheable this can be set to Enabled or Disabled. Having the BIOS cacheable will only copy your BIOS into ur RAM on boot.

NiTrous~>

J-M · #7 01-28-2005, 03:29 PM

That's my point, it's not in there. Nowhere in my BIOS does it have any such option to disable caching/shadowing!

Ahh.. if anyone has any ideas, please throw them at me. I desperately need them at this point. Any questions on system specs leave them here or look in previous posts.

aurora72 · #8 02-13-2005, 05:01 AM

Quote:

Originally Posted by J-M

That's my point, it's not in there. Nowhere in my BIOS does it have any such option to disable caching/shadowing!

Ahh.. if anyone has any ideas, please throw them at me. I desperately need them at this point. Any questions on system specs leave them here or look in previous posts.

I had gone thru a similar problem: In a PII-333 (66*5) machine with O.S. W2K Server, the blue screen had appeared and even the safe mode option from F8 menu hadn't help. Therefore as a last chance I had to disable the BIOS caching and it helped! (though it opened w2k extremely slowly) After the first boot, I returned to BIOS once more and enabled the (512 KB) caching again and it booted successfully again.

Earlier I had experienced another problem at the same machine with the same O.S. There was no device listed in the device manager. To eliminate this problem I had to remove some suspected hardware (the sound card and 56K PCI modem) re-install the O.S. But this time those blue screens started to appear more frequently.

If the BIOS had no option of disabling prozessor caching, there would be no way out of it I think. But I think it's there because it's an old computer. The newer mainboards may not have it.

aurora72 · #9 02-13-2005, 06:51 PM

Right after I sent my post, I realized that the computer started to boot much worse than ever: It failed to boot properly even when caching was disabled. So evaluated the whole system again and decided to make changes in the RAMs. It had 2 different brands of SD-RAMs each 64MB sitting on 2 slots. I removed one of them and it worked out great and now it boots perfectly!

Just for your information.