All right, good morning, afternoon and
good evening everybody and welcome back to ITProTV.
I'm Don Pezet and in this episode we're continuing on with CompTIA IT fundamentals
specifically, troubleshooting and this is a special episode we're gonna
deviate a little bit from our normal kind of teaching by telling and all that mess.
[LAUGH] And
we're gonna do an actual demonstration of what it's like to troubleshoot a computer
that's having an issue and sorting out a problem and I've got
Ronnie right back here with me to assist and to walk us through that process.
Right.
So thanks for joining us Ronnie.
Well, Don thank you for having me as we continue to take a look at this amazing
idea here of troubleshooting methodologies.
We of course want to make sure that everybody understands and
show you how intuitive this can be as well.
So, what we're going to do of course then is just kinda start off with the issue and
then have Don walk us through the rest of this process.
So that's what we're going to be picking up on.
Alright so Ronnie, we've got a system that's actually down here
on the floor because it's a little bit too big so we couldn't have it up on the desk
with us but, you've got a system and you've got some kind of issue with it.
So tell me about your problem.
So, Don, I booted up my server and I started checking some
things out because it wasn't exactly what I was thinking, so, of course,
I went into my Task Manager and then I started seeing something unusual, here.
So let's take a look at my screen and this will help us out.
So right here, on my Task Manager, as I looked in the Performance tab,
I did notice something underneath Memory,
that this server is suppose to have 64 gigs of RAM.
And Don, I'm registering right about 48, is what I'm registering.
So, this is not what it needs to be.
There's 8 sticks of RAM in here, so that should be 64.
All right, so, obviously that's not right and in the past you know for
a fact it had 64?
I do.
[LAUGH]
I actually remember us doing a show and
showed you 64 gigs of RAM.
And so, yes, it was working.
All right, and so when you powered on the server did it give any warnings or
errors, did you hear any beeps, any unusual behavior like that?
There were actually no unusual behaviors.
Everything launched up but when I started to try and launch something,
I kind of realized things weren't running the way they needed to be.
That's why I started to check the performance tab.
That's when I found out that I had a memory issue, so I need some help.
Okay, now beyond seeing just missing memory here,
have you seen anything else over the last week or so?
Has the system randomly locked up?
Have you had to reboot the system more frequently?
Have you seen anything like that or has it been all normal behavior?
It's been normal up until the last, let's say, day or so.
And all of a sudden, it did kinda shut down on me but I rebooted it,
and it worked fine.
Okay, and, and
here's the important question, has anything changed in the system recently?
Have you added any new software, changed any drivers,
has anybody been doing physical work around the system, anything like that?
I do have to admit, Don, I have been moving the system around a little bit, so
it is possible that something might have done that, but for
it to miss a whole stick of RAM, everything looks like it's on there.
Okay, all right, well you mentioned a whole stick of RAM.
I don't actually know the RAM configuration side of this server.
I know from what you've told me, and
let me make sure that I'm hearing all this right.
The server should have 64 gigs of RAM in it.
We can clearly see right here it's only got 48 gigs of RAM in it.
So we're missing about 16 gigs of RAM.
Now there's a number of things that could cause this,
but it is unusual for memory to disappear.
Have you seen it reappear and then disappear?
Or you've just noticed now that it's gone?
How does that look?
Yeah no, I've just noticed it's gone.
So I could be wrong, but it actually is about 16 gigs RAM and Don,
as I remember it, I think there's actually 8 gig sticks of RAM that are in this.
So I thought it was 1 16 gig stick, but I think it's 8 gig sticks.
Okay.
So I might be missing two,
or whatever the configuration might be.
I'm working on a few different theories here,
and there's a couple of things that can cause this type of problem.
We could have things like bad memory,
maybe a memory stick failed, it's in there but the system isn't able to see it.
We could have loose memory where he moved the machine,
maybe the memory got jostled out of its socket.
It could be gone.
Maybe somebody stole the memory.
I know that sounds crazy but university environments, schools,
places where they can't necessarily secure the computers very well, it does happen,
it could be stolen.
Unfortunately, Windows isn't gonna show me that.
Windows sees one big bank or memory, right?
BIOS is responsible for initializing that memory, exposing it to the system.
And so we can see the individual sticks of memory inside of the BIOS in the system.
So what we're gonna do is we're gonna have Ronnie shut this system down.
And if this is a server we might have to arrange for downtime or
something like that.
But he's gonna shut it down.
And we're gonna boot that back up and go into the BIOS.
Now, if you watched our episode on BIOS, you've seen that process.
But he just shut the system down.
He's powering it on, and he's gonna do that thing where he hits
the delete key at just the right moment to get into the BIOS.
I wanna see if BIOS recognizes the memory.
If BIOS sees the memory, sees 64 gigs of memory, and
Windows is only seeing 48, then I've got a Windows problem.
Something is wrong in software that I need to fix, right?
But if the BIOS isn't seeing the memory either,
now I know I've got a hardware problem.
I've got some kind of issue most likely with the memory stick,
possibly with the port on the motherboard, right?
It could be the memory stick is fine.
The port on the motherboard's gone bad and it can't see the memory stick.
Some of the solutions we might do here,
we could move one memory stick from one socket to another and see if it works.
That'll help us do process of elimination.
We could also try, well actually we don't have to try much do we?
Right here on the first BIOS screen.
So Ronnie just got in there and
I can pretty clearly see on it that we've got some memory missing.
Now this are 8GB sticks Ronnie was right when he said it was 8GB.
And if we have a 64GB bank of memory that means we will have 8 sticks.
But if I look at this list I'm not seeing 8 sticks am I?
I'm seeing 6.
I'm actually showing two sticks of missing memory right?
The DDR4_C1 and C2 are both missing.
Well, it's nice that I know C1 and C2, because if I were to open the system up
and look at the motherboard, I'd know exactly what sockets to look at.
But my math isn't the greatest here, Ronnie.
If we add all this up, if I have six sticks of 8 gigs each, that is 48 gigs.
So I'm missing two 8 gig sticks of memory.
I've been talking about this like it was one stick that was bad.
We might actually have two sticks that are bad, or stolen, or missing, or
misconfigured.
All right.
Fortunately, this motherboard actually does give us some additional
diagnoses here.
Normally this is where I would open up the case and look inside of it.
But in this system there's a neat little tool in it
that lets us see the hardware that's being detected by the motherboards.
Ronnie can you launch that, I think it's called a system browser?
Right.
So it should be right here, system browser.
There we go.
Let's zoom in on that because it is a little bit on the smaller side.
But here it's showing the motherboard, and we can see the of memory.
This is kind of interesting.
On the main screen, I only saw six sticks of memory.
Here, back me up on this, Ronnie.
I'm seeing seven stacks, right?
Yeah, that's one, two, three, four up here at the top.
And then three down here, so Don,
that still doesn't explain the missing memory here.
All right.
As what we're seeing.
Well, let's move it a bit here so I can see what's showing up.
When you move your mouse over each of those it's saying the name, right?
So there's DDR4_C1 is empty, move up and that's DDR4_C2.
In the other page, the C2 memory bank showed empty.
On this page, it's showing that I've got a memory stick in there, and
it's detecting and it's there.
C1 is missing.
So what's going on here is in a lot of systems,
they have memory that is required in pairs.
You have to put in two sticks at a time, an even number.
You can't have three memory sticks.
So, right now I've got seven memory sticks, and that's an odd number, so
it's dropping one off.
That's why it looks like I'm missing two sticks, but
in reality I'm just missing one stick.
All right, so now, now we've got a culprit and we know that one socket.
So, there's a few things we can try here, but
I wanna do the path of least resistance, right?
Usually the simplest solution is the correct one I think it's Occam's Razor.
Yeah.
So
in this case, the odds are Ronnie moved this system.
It's probably just a loose stick of memory.
So the first thing we wanna try is popping that memory out of that first socket,
the one that shows its empty, and popping the memory back in.
All right?
See if it solves the problem.
All right, Don, that is the path of least resistance.
But let's say that we try that and it doesn't work.
What should I try and do then?
It's a good thing to have a plan B, or a plan C or whatever.
So if it doesn't work, then I might have bigger problem.
Either the socket could be bad on the board, or the chip could be bad.
So we might try swapping chips 7 and 8, or C1 and C2, flip them around.
And see where the problem goes.
If the problem stays in the same spot,
then I probably got a socket problem on the motherboard.
If the problem moves to the other spot,
then I've probably got an issue with that particular stick of memory.
It's helping me to isolated where that issue is.
But instead of worrying about that, let's try the easiest one.
Hopefully this will solve our problems.
So Ronnie let's go ahead and shut this system down again.
And so he's gonna power it off.
And once it's off, we'll go ahead and reseat that memory.
So anytime you take a piece of equipment out and just put it back in,
they call it reseating.
When it comes to RAM, that's not that uncommon because RAM gets hot and
it swells, and then it cools down and it shrinks, and
that can cause it to work loose.
That's why a lot of memory will have little latching arms that go on the side
to hold it and stop that from happening.
PCI express cards, they can do the same thing.
And that's why they usually have a screw on one side and
a little latch on the other.
But if they're missing one of those, those cards can start to go crooked over time.
They get warm, they get cold.
They get warm, they get cold and they just start to wiggle loose.
Processors usually have a pressure lock arm they call it
like a zero insertion force socket, that you can lock them in,
they can wigle loose, power supply connectors can.
Almost all the ones that I've just named have some kind of clip on them to try and
hold them in place.
And so hopefully that's not an issue that we're gonna have.
Now, Ronnie just finished reseating the memory and he hit power, he's gonna boot.
We're gonna go right back into BIOS this time because it's faster than booting all
the way into Windows.
So let's watch that process here as it boots up, and
we're gonna go back into the BIOS and see what happened, right?
Hopefully, all eight sticks of memory show up, it's all there, we're in good shape.
Worst case scenario it's the same.
Because that would mean we probably have a bad motherboard and
we've gotta do a warranty call or replace the motherboard.
It could be that the memory stick moves, and that would mean we need new memory.
That particular piece of memory is bad.
Now it may not actually be totally bad.
You might be able to run diagnostics on it.
But typically, you don't mess around with memory.
Once it starts going bad, there's no repairing it.
It just goes bad.
Fortunately, memory is not all that expensive these days.
The motherboard is, so I'd rather not replace the motherboard,
if we can avoid it.
But if I get to pick my problem, I'm hoping it's just the memory.
Actually, I'm hoping it's just the chip right?
That you receiving it will solve our problem.
And things are looking good.
So Ronnie just went right back into the BIOS and right off the bat,
I noticed that I've got eight sticks of memory showing up which is good.
My total memory is showing as 64 gigs.
That's good.
And then Ronnie you want to go back to the hardware monitors?
Maybe a.
Hardware monitor?
Right.
And so
we can take a look at what that board looks like and
this time we can see that all the banks are showing as populated.
So it does look like we had some loose memory.
Now, I'm not completely done here.
We've got one more step which is let's go ahead and boot all the way into Windows.
And when we boot all the way into our operating system,
we need to make sure that it's recognizing this memory again as well, alright?
Now, let's just assume for a moment that it fixes is,
because we'll give Ronnie a chance to get that booted up.
I need to be thinking about one, how I verify this is actually fixed, but
then two, I need to think about root cause analysis.
How did it come loose?
All right, It came loose because Ronnie moved the server, most likely.
He moved the server and that chip got weak.
Or started to slide out of the socket and started causing problems.
That reboot he had the other day could easily be caused by that.
The missing memory easily caused by that.
So now what can we do to prevent that in the future?
And he just booted up and let's look.
Hey, we got our 64 gigs of RAM.
So things are back to normal.
We've solved the symptom.
The cause was the server being moved.
Now, I can't tell somebody not to move a server, right?
[LAUGH] Because they may have various
reasons for it.
So the solution here for long term might be that we need to have a policy that
says, whenever we physically move a server from one rack to another or
one room to another, that we take a moment to open the server and
push the memory back in, push the PCI cards back in.
That we take a little bit of time to secure that and
make sure that things are being safely and responsibly removed.
Or, maybe we don't even do that.
We just say, any time a server is moved,
we need to immediately run a diagnostic on it to make sure that all the hardware
is healthy before we just walk away from it in the new location.
So that's all simple stuff we can fix through processes, procedures and
policy that's our lesson learned here is, this all could have been avoided if after
moving the server Ronnie checked the hardware and
made sure it was the same as when it left.
So, that's kind of how we go through a troubleshooting process now through all of
this, we went through all 8 phases, of the troubleshooting methodology, and
we did it in like 15 minutes, right?
I mean that's how this stuff normally works in the real world,
it's not an hour long process or whatever, if it is usually it's time escalate there
is nothing wrong with saying I don't have the knowledge to fix this problem.
Let me hand that off to someone else, right?
Unless there's no one else to hand off to.
Right.
And then you got to solve it.
You've gotta put your nose to the grindstone.
So in this case though, I think we've got this one wrapped up.
And I don't know.
Ronnie are you a satisfied customer?
I am a satisfied customer because all of my RAM now shows up.
That means I can run all the machines I need to.
Which is what I'm looking for.
All right, well, I feel like I should do like Best Buy, right?
I need you to please fill out our customer satisfaction survey,
and we like five stars.
And I'll draw a smiley face on your receipt, and send you on your way.
Sounds great, like a great idea there.
[LAUGH] All right.
Well ladies and gentlemen, hopefully you enjoyed that.
Just an example of troubleshooting out there in the field.
As always, document your findings.
That's really important.
And, you know, best of luck being out there, doing research.
Don't hesitate to use Google and other tools.
You'll find a wealth of information.
Before we wrap up, Ronnie do you have any parting advice for
our budding IT troubleshooters?
Well, the easiest way to start doing this, right, is to take those machines and
start running through that process, making sure that you help out who you can.
And you'll start seeing it will become second nature to you.
Everybody wants to be a good troubleshooter when it comes down to it,
especially in the IT field.
So take some time, learn how to actually do it.
And all of a sudden it becomes second nature, you'll be fine and ready to go.
All right, well ladies and gentlemen, that's gonna be a wrap for this episode.
Hope you guys enjoyed it, and enjoy the entire CompTIA IT Fundamentals series.
If you haven't watched all the episodes, be sure to check that out.
It's all right there in the ITProTV library.
But for now, signing off for ITProTV I'm Don Pezet.
And I'm Ronnie Wong.
And we'll see you next time.
[MUSIC]
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