OK. So I took all the pieces I was gonna use to build my new system and gave them to my dad for christmas.

I gave him two sticks of Crucial Ballistix Tracer PC6400 to go with the system. He installed them in the first two RAM slots and everything worked fine. Well, just last night I sold him the other two sticks I had (identical to the first two). I wake up this morning and he says the RAM is bad. So I go up and start trying different methods with the PC. I take the original two sticks out and install the two I sold him in the first two RAM slots and the PC worked fine. So that rules out faulty ram. Then I moved them to the back two slots. Wrong. The PC gets past the post screen and scans all SATA devices. It then moves to the next screen that says aomsething along the lines of:

"PCI-E to SATAII/IDE bridge RAID Controller. No devices found" and right when it should move onto the verifying DMI pool data screen, shuts down. I'm talking just cuts off. Like someone yanked out the power cord.


I removed the RAM stick from slot 4, and the PC got past this screen just fine. Then I removed RAM stick 3 and replaced a stick into slot 4 and it halted at this screen again.


Sopmething is screwy with this RAM slot. I DON'T THINK it is a bad board, because no matter what combination of RAM you put in it, all 4GB or just a single stick in that last spot, it will recognize it fine at the POST screen. But it does NOT like to work past this second boot-up screen with anything installed ijnto the 4th RAM slot. The mothterboard model is GA-M59SLI-S5.

I'm thinking along the lines of a conflict of some sort. The question is, what?

So, if I understand, both pair of RAM sticks work in the good slots?

If they aren't using RAID I would disable the RAID option in the BIOS.

RAID has not been enabled in any way form or fashion.


Any stick will work properly in any slot except the 4th slot. That's the problem.

You did some good troubleshooting techniques. That is the by the book procedure on how to determine where the error is. You seem to have hit on it, the slot is bad. I've RMA'd 2 boards for the same issue. Good job FireDemon.

Yeah. We even tried moving the video card to PCI-E 16x #2.

My first thought was a bad slot. But I didn't want accept something so shady as a possibility. So I was hoping it was a conflict. Oh well.