On Friday 23 April 2004 10:37, David Straiton wrote:
I am trying to add more memory to my Linux box. The specs on the box state that it is upgradable to 2GB.
It's not Linux it's the motherboard. It can only deal with memory chips of a certain size. How many memory slots? If there are 4 then division says you can have 512 per slot. That might need to be a double sided 512 stick, it would probably only see 256 of a single sided stick.
I added a 512MB stick in addition to the 128MB stick and I could not configure it past 384MB. Yep, it's only seeing 256 of the 512. You'll see this while BIOS checks the ram on startup. The number won't be 384 Meg exactly because a Meg isn't 10^6 bytes.
I changed the order of the sticks, I entered append "mem=640M" in the lilo.conf and ran lilo.
To test the memory stick, I put it in another computer (WinXP) and the full 512M showed up. I put a 256M along with the 128M and the results were the same as when I had the 512MB. Is there a configuration or kernel parameter I need to change or has someone run into this situation before?
Check the motherboard manufacturer's website and check the changelogs of the BIOS. A BIOS update might get it to see the bigger chips. Otherwise, go back to the supplier they might have 256 Meg sticks. mine kept swapping them until it became clear that it was a motherboard limitation. Then I turned to the local linux group and found some people who were happy to swap my new sticks for older RAM that would work for me. Good luck, michaelj -- Michael James michael.james@csiro.au System Administrator voice: 02 6246 5040 CSIRO Bioinformatics Facility fax: 02 6246 5166