For months I have been having problems with my A3000. First The machine 
would just randomly kernel panic, after being on for a few days. Often it 
would do so In X and the debugger was not visible so it just looked like 
a freeze. I figured after a few days the machine was srarting to address 
the upper memory so I took out 12 (leaving 4MB) that worked for a while 
and then the samething started happening. (So it must have not been the 
12 MB of upper memory) I decided to put the 12MB back in and to see if 
upgrading to 1.5 would help. The first time I booted up after adding the 
second 12MB is that it was just not being recognized. Netbsd, and AmigaOS 
thought I only had 4MB. I tried rearranging the ZIP chips (on the 3000 
motherboard) and that allowed the full 16MB to be visible, but when I 
booted the miniroot (or by 1.4.2 partition) I got this message repeated 
over and over: Process (pid 1) got signal 4. I was unable to check this 
signal as I can't boot netbsd at all anymore) So I tried rearranging 
again (and all those tweaking ZIP chips on an A3000 know how much of a 
pain it is to get at them!!!) and now neither the miniroot nor the 1.4.2 
partitions boot at all (The bootblock screen comes up, but where it 
usually prints out memory address for the kernel it actually shows 
nothing, and finally just freezes) 

Since I get different symptoms everytime i rearrange my ZIP chips I am 
assuming this is a ZIP RAM problem. Does anyone know of any ZIP RAM 
diagnostic software? Something that will probe the memory and tell me 
what is wrong, what chips are dead or connected improperly. Now that I 
can't boot netbsd it would have to be an AmigaOS executable. With all my 
ZIP swapping I id notice that the sockets are a bit loose, but all the 
contacts are made with the chips. If no one knows of any software to help 
me I suppose I should put 4MB at a time in the first bank and though 
elimiation find the ZIPS with problems (but this would not help me if 
the problems lie in the sockets!!)

Thanks so much for your time.

Ben Bogart

I guess I'm going to have to byte the bullet and buy myself a i386/netbsd 
machine. *sigh*



B. Bogart
Convergent Media Designer
--------------------------
Through scientific absolution we move further and further away from ourselves.