Recently posted in our community, Greg Hrutkay was working on some Xserves, using some RAM out of his Mac Pro, someone chimed in about bad RAM slots in their Power Mac G5 – now to be featured as a part of the “Low End Mac Mailbag“. As a part of the Low End Mac mailbag, we aim to:

• Greatly increase daily article output
• Save the knowledge shared by others
• Have our community be more “out there”, etching their name on the website.
• Answer commonly asked questions, helping you problem-solve your Mac.
• Showcase projects done by others to encourage people to fix their devices.

Greg Hrutkay: “I am an idiot I’ve been running my 5,1 converted Mac Pro in triple channel since the day I got it… I moved the RAM in it over to my Xserve and ended up doing a dual dual channel set up and never tested it… I’ve been spending all day long trying to update my operating system, and it kept throwing me errors that kept all having the same commonality… RAM…

I thought my hard drive was going bad no it turns out that the last two slots just don’t work in this one. I figured that out after the new installer failed to fully boot up and gave me the same error. now it’s running fine again “

Reply 1: “I’ve been having no shortage of woes with RAM in G5s. You put in 8 identical sticks to play hours of musical “dead” slots. Keep swapping in and out and the slot that worked on last boot reports “empty” this time. Rinse and repeat with god knows how many sticks and eventually you get your 8 or 16 gb fully populated value.”

Reply 2: “I had that issue with a DC 2.3 G5 , ended up taking the board out and bathing it in a bath of 91 ipa for about 30 minutes, then used a soft brush to clean it. It’s been fine ever since.”

Reply 3: “anytime I thought I had a dead stick of ram in my DP 2.0 2003 G5 7,2, swapping around the sticks would solve the issue. Very rare for the ram to go bad in that machine.. relatable.”