memory parity error message

[jerry37]

My system is displaying a message "memory parity error, system halted" It completely locks up. So much so that I have to turn the switch off to reboot. I can run the machine in "safe mode" (win 95) but none of the peripherals work.
The machine is a pentium with 128 mb ram. There are 6 ram cards. Four of them have eight chips each and then two of them have 16 chips each. I can't tell how much memory is on each card. I got the computer used, so I don't know.

I don't know what the message means but I think if I remove some of the memory it might work. The problem is, what should I take out? Of course a better solution would be to make the message go away and have the computer work correctly but I don't have a clue how to do that. Before the message came up and the system locked up it would give me a message about "missing memory" when it booted up. I'm sorry, I don't remember the precise wording.

If anyone has an answer, or could point me in the right direction I sure would be grateful

 

[Buggeroo]

In my oppinion, the most likley cause of this (as you yourself pointed out) is a faulty RAM module, or possibly an incompatibility issue between the modules. I think your best bet would be to try to remove the modules in the two last slots and see if it works. If it does, most likely you are looking at bad RAM.
I am guessing that, since it is a pentium (and the fact that you have 6 modules for 128MB), you are using EDO-RAM, which is not as cheap as SDRAM due to the fact that it is becoming obsolete. It is not utterly unaffordable though, and unless you would want to live with less RAM or buy a new PC, it might be your only option.

Hope this is somehow useful to you

 

[Robotix]

You can turn off the memory parity check in the bios as some motherboards have problems with some types of memory. You will not notice any problems unless the memory is realy faulty.