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View Full Version : Off the wall question...

Kinerry
11-11-02, 03:28 PM
Can you boot up a system without ANY ram?
I'm talking just into the bios setup...
Johnny Knoxville
11-11-02, 03:31 PM
no, not that i know of anyway
moorcito
11-11-02, 03:33 PM
Why don't you try it and find out?
cack01
11-11-02, 03:47 PM
I bet if you could hack the bios, and some how set up some virtual ram off a HDD or a Ram disk then you could boot up.
Kinerry
11-11-02, 03:48 PM
thats the point, i tried to test my new mobo without ram, thats why I asked

I have a d bracket and its telling me its not getting past initialization, the next step would be ram initialization, so I am guessing i gotta wait for the ram lol
ThePerfectCore
11-11-02, 04:28 PM
Funny, I thought older systems could boot with just the 640kb of "conventialnalnalsatnelnalsdnlafsndl"* RAM installed.

*No, I don't know how to spell it. :-p
FarEast
11-11-02, 07:17 PM
Originally posted by ThePerfectCore
Funny, I thought older systems could boot with just the 640kb of "conventialnalnalsatnelnalsdnlafsndl"* RAM installed.

*No, I don't know how to spell it. :-p


LOL.......... :D
FTC
11-12-02, 05:34 AM
Hi,

No, it is *impossible* for a x86 PC to boot without any RAM at all. Note that having the so called '640K real mode RAM' is already having some RAM (in fact, it's having quite much... during 8 years PCs did not have more than that).

The reason for all this is that BIOS needs RAM to establish your descriptor tables, and interrupt tables. and for the code itself. Even if part of all this *can* be supplied with ROM, there are defined BIOS variables (which must be in RAM) that are in the segment x040 and that any BIOS updates as part of its initialization routines.

Regards
FTC
Captain Slug
11-12-02, 01:57 PM
Yeah. My "wicked fast" 486 laptop has 640K of RAM and barely run Solitaire. I've never seen the cards bounce that slowly before...
ronin1967
11-12-02, 02:31 PM
On a modern machine the only way to boot and avoid RAM is to create conditions that forces BIOS BOOT LOCK, normally this occurs after a bad flash, the BIOS is prevented from initialising by the BOOT BLOCK sector in the BIOS Chip and it falls back on system defaults. Unless you have an extra EPROM lying around I would say wait for your memory...