Faulty ram disables USB ports causes HD to click

ratchetclan4 · 27 Jun 2011

Recentley i was getting alot of bluescreens about 6 a day when using my Geil 2x2gb DDR3 1333mhz Ram sticks

i have swapped these out for a single 2gb Vdata ddr3 1333mhz stick.
and windows 7 64bit has been running fine, and i have not had any more bsods.
however i like to have alot of programs open and to do alot at one time and with 2gb of ram programs tend to not respond or run slow when i do this.

so i tried putting the geil sticks back in for a total of 6gb ram.

my pc started fine, i could type on skype, windows said i had 6gb and the experience score was 7.5 for RAM, and task manager says 5000 free memory

however as i was typing on skype my mouse and keyboard locked up it kept typing aaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaa i tried replugging them and i still couldnt type or use my mouse. and my harddrive made a clicking noise every 5 seconds and the speakers sound looped however the pc was still responsive because animations still played on a webpage i was on.

could this be due to the fact that my motherboard does not support GEIL memory
or both sticks of GEIL ram are infact faulty?
because it looked to me like the ram is functional.

Motherboard:Asus m4n68t
graphics card:Ati radeon 5770HD

theog · 27 Jun 2011

Is this the noise your HD is making:
Normally you will not hear the HD.
YouTube - ‪Hard Drive Click of Death Explanation and Live Demonstration‬&rlm;

pooch · 27 Jun 2011

Have you tried putting just one Geil stick in and seeing what happens? and then changing it for the other stick to try that one out ?
Mixing RAM is also not a good idea but I think for the moment you should concentrate on the old RAM and when you have sorted out the problem you should then try adding the new stick.
RAM - Test with Memtest86+

EDIT just found this;

pooch · 27 Jun 2011

In addition you should maybe update your BIOS as there are stability fixes including fixes for RAM available; ASUSTeK Computer Inc. -Support- Drivers and Download M4N68T