SE/30 memory problem

[Alphasite]

I have an SE/30 with eight 16M SIMMs.  I've been using it with A/UX.  I wanted to try the prebuilt A/UX image with my SCSI2SD card but I get a Sad Mac error when I try to boot it.  I tried the troubleshooting steps in that thread in the *NIX forum without luck so I decided to try to remove half the memory to see if that was the issue as I had problems with A/UX on a IIci with 128MB of RAM installed.

I pulled the four SIMMs from the second bank and when I powered on I got the error chord and a scrambled screen.  Thinking that I might have a memory issue I swapped the in the four SIMMs I removed.  I got the same error chord and scrambled screen.  I moved the four SIMMs to the second bank, still had an error.

I reinstalled all eight SIMMs and it boots just fine.  I removed the battery to clear the PRAM and that didn't help.

Any idea what I'm doing wrong?

 

[Alphasite]

I had found an old thread that said a normal SE/30 only had to have one bank populated when using 16MB SIMMs unless you had an accelerator.  I decided to test it with four 1MB SIMMs in the second bank and it worked.  So it looks like a variation on standard SE/30s as some work and some don't.

 

[Von]

I have never played with A/UX. Is it possible to have it on a partition on the same drive running other version of 6 and 7?

 

[Crutch]

Funny, I had almost the same experience this weekend.  Had four extra 16MB SIMMs and decided to upgrade an old 2MB SE/30 I had lying around to 64MB.  Using just the four 16MB SIMMs in either slot didn’t work (scrambled screen), BUT if I put 1MB (i.e., 4 of my old 256k SIMMs) in one bank and the four 16MB SIMMs in the other bank, it works fine (as I recall this only worked with the 16MB SIMMs in Bank B but I may be remembering that backwards, I tried a bunch of configurations).

So, I now have perfectly functioning 65MB SE/30.