ram question

[Doug Sutherland]

Check the BIOS POST memory counter and make sure that all of the RAM
is showing up in that test. Sometimes the BIOS is set to enable quick
boot (which skips the memory test), so you may need to turn off that
quick boot to enable POST test. Unfortunately no speech for these.

If you are using grub, by default grub passes a mem= parameter to the
kernel and sometimes gets it wrong. You can disable grub's doing this
and let the kernel decide how much memory you have by adding the
--no-mem-option flag in the kernel entry in /boot/grub/menu.lst

kernel --no-mem-option /boot/kernel root=/dev/hdXX

You don't need the high mem support in the kernel, that's for mem
over 2GB I think (or something like that). It definitely works with
512MB without it turned on.

You might consider swapping those 128MB DIMMs in one at a time to
see if they both are working.

Sometimes programs like lm_sensors will see a RAM module but the
system will not. I recently bought a 512MB SO-DIMM and only 256MB
was showing up. The smbus type stuff in both windows and linux
said it was a 512MB SO-DIMM but it was defective, only half of
the RAM was working. Had it replaced and the new one worked fine.
One of your DIMMs might be bad.

Also, as suggested, read your motherboard manual, sometimes there
are rules about which banks can be used and in which order etc.

   -- Doug