Adding RAM to Gateway!!!???

I added a 128 PC133 SDRAM stick in the DIMM2 slot to a customers Gateway Essential 500 and when the pc booted the 128 stick was recognized, which totalled 256 now. After the POST Windows XP started to load and immediatly went to a screen that said the following "the following file is missing or corrupted system32\drivers fastfat.sys - you need to run WINXP setup and select "r" at the setup screen ". This seemed odd to me so I found out that the original stick of ram that came with the Gateway was PC100 so I installed a NEW 128 PC100 stick in the DIMM2 slot and got the same message. So then I tried to do what the message said to do and it got just past the point in setup where it states "If you need to load SCSI drivers press F6...etc." Setup stops and says can't load NTKRNL.??? - error code 4 -setup cannot continue ". I am getting frustrated now so I go back to the car and just so happen to have a stick of 64meg PC133 ram so I take both the old and the new 128 sticks out and replace them with the 1 64 meg stick and it boots with no problem. So I am thinking; however rare it may be, that the 2 NEW 128 meg sticks are bad so I go back to the office and plug each one of them in individually in a system and they BOTH work fine. So I go back to the customers house and install 1 of the new stick without the original and the computer will not boot, at all, no POST screen, on either NEW 128 stick. If this post makes any sense, I would appreciatte any help on this.

Thanks

jerry

 

I had a similar problem on a gateway. I called gateway and gave them the serial number of the motherboard and they told me what kind and how much ram would work in the DIMMs. Different ages of gateway use different configs of RAM.

I had the same sort of indication you have. It was because I was trying to put 512 stick in and the max was 128 in one DIMM and 384 max for the three DIMMs. Every time I tried to load XP, I got a different reason that it wouldn't work.

I ended up using the orig 128 PC 100 and an old stick of 64 PC 100 I had laying around. XP loaded just fine on that.