ram question

[Gregory Nowak]

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I'm using lilo on this box. I'll have to get a sightling here to let
me know what the bios says about the amount of ram during
POST. However ... I decided to get into bios, hook up my blazer to the
parallel port, and wouldn't you know it, the print screen key thing
works. Navigation isn't easy, but it is doable if you listen
carefully, and have heard the options in the bios read to you before,
so you know what you should expect to hear and when. Anyway, I
believe in standard CMOS setup, it shows the total amount of extended
ram in the system, and that's reading 384, so I know the problem isn't
OS-specific. I've also looked for a memory interleave option, but
didn't find one.

I then called up a friend who has the same identical board in his
system, and he confirmed that there is no memory interleave option
anywhere in the bios. He also took out his copy of the motherboard
manual which is again identical to mine. He confirmed that the system
can in fact take up to 768M of ram, in 3 dim sockets, with each socket
being able of supporting up to 256M memory modules. It didn't say
anything specific about memory placement on the board, just how much
memory the board could take, and the module size supported per dimm
socket.

Then, I tested the 2 128 modules and the 1 256 modules separately, and
the system recognizes the correct size for each of them when installed
alone. After that, I tried all 3 combinations of installing the
modules:

combination a, 128, 128, 256.

b, 128, 256, 128.

c, 256, 128, 128.

All of these only recognized 383M of ram.

I'm out of ideas at this point. Thanks for the help and suggestions so
far.

Greg


On Mon, Mar 22, 2004 at 09:44:43PM -0500, Doug Sutherland wrote:
> 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
> 
> 
> _______________________________________________
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> Speakup at braille.uwo.ca
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