Is it posible to damage a mobo by trying to boot with half installed DIMMs

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DanNeely

Supreme [H]ardness
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Aug 26, 2005
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I'm in the process of standing my old PC down from my main rig to a CPU only computing box. As part of doing so I pulled my GTX260 cards out and replaced them with a low power card. The case it's in is very tight and it was neccesary to swing the cards towards the DIMMs in order to pull them out of the case. After completing the card swap I powered the system on again. Drives and fans spun up but the monitor didn't come on. Double checked that everything was still seated tightly and found that two of the dimms had been knocked loose. I reseated them and tried again, still nothing.

At this point I realized I wasn't hearing a post code beep either. I then stuck a PCI post code reader card in, and tried again nothing there it stayed on the initial value the whole time (caveat, I'm not sure I ever tested the card with the mobo while the system was working, so there might be a compatibility issue here). I'm not quite sure what to try next. I could try swapping parts with my other s1366 system but except for the ram that'd be a pita because of the water block.
 
Did you try putting the GTX260 back in and making sure it's not the new gpu thats the problem?
 
I did and it didn't work.

To clarify it's the 920 with a P6TD from my sig.
 
No, I've done it by accident before. I ran with 4 gigs for a couple weeks before realizing one of them wasn't pushed in all the way. :eek:

Try resetting the CMOS, and go with 1 stick of ram in. If it posts then try it with the other stick, and eventually all of the RAM.
 
tried a CMOS clear, and tried all 9 legal single dimm single slot combinations (according to the manual not being able to boot with ram only in the second channel slots is an intel limitation).

The post code my monitor card is reading is either 18 or 81; although a bit of googling seems to indicate that AMI has changed what the codes stand for from one revision of the bios to the next so it's not a particularly useful number to have.
 
I looked at the manuals for two Asus 1366 boards that had a post code reader of some sort; the P6TWS/P6T7WS-SC both only showed of subset of about 20 codes, the rampage 2 extreme's reader apparently showed the full set but it converted the codes into english text which doesn't do me any good.

I think I'm at teh point of having to swap parts with my working system, but that's going to have to wait until tomorrow.
 
i'd swap in some other memory and test. I doubt you fried the rest of the system.
 
I just swapped memory, both sets of dimms work in the new PC, neither work in the old one.
 
CPU checks as good. I'm going to try pulling the mobo and running it outside the case tmorrow; but barring that remote possiblity it looks like I'll be contacting newegg for an RMA.
 
Unplug your machine. Hold the power button for 10 seconds. Release. Wait another 20 seconds. Put ram in. Plug in, power on.

See if that works.
 
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