What happens when no RAM is present

[Gordon.C]

Hi,

what happens when no RAM is plugged into the Motherboard?

Does the operating system refuse to boot or does it automatically use hard drive as a supplement of RAM?

 

[johnb35]

The system won't boot and should beep at you.

 

[ayan]

You can't load anything dirrectly from the hard drive. All programs need the ram's accessability . There's no freakin way anything will work without ram. The hard drive suplements don't work as you might think. You don't just extend the memory on the hard drive, but rather use a small remaining part of the ram as a buffer, and keep writing the buffer to the hard drive, and reading it again.
I think you can make a program that only runs on the cache memory and processor registres, but it wil be very very limited, and by deffinition unable to display anything graphic.

 

[larsch]

Part of the bios tend to be compressed. It needs ram to be uncompressed.

 

[StrangleHold]

You have a BIOS and CMOS. The BIOS has the firmware instructions on a ROM chip. The CMOS has the systems setup. The BIOS feeds the CMOS setup into memory at boot.

 

[G80FTW]

As stated, a computer will not boot without RAM installed. Iv never even seen one POST without RAM installed. As stated, it will just beep at you to tell you that there is no RAM installed. The computer needs somewhere to store information, and if no RAM is present, then theres nothing it can do.