Well, I was going by the System Monitor that is included with GNOME. The cat /proc/meminfo results in a MemTotal of 224436 kb. When I try the mem=288M it gives me an Error 28: Selected item cannot fit into memory. I find that puzzling since the BIOS reports the full 288M. Running dmidecode shows that the maximum memory for the system is actually 384M, but I don't have another chip to put in and I don't think that would be worthwhile anyway unless I can get this figured out. I actually know about the thinkwiki site. It helped me solve my audio problems, but there is very little info on there about memory issues. I'm beginning to wonder if I need to update the BIOS or maybe dmidecode is wrong about this system. It hasn't been wrong on other systems I used it with, but this could be a quirk of the IBM system.
On Thu, Jul 17, 2008 at 1:01 AM, Bob Proulx <
bob@proulx.com> wrote:
Isaac MacFarlane wrote:
> Hello all. I have 288MB installed in my system and the BIOS does see it all,
> but Debian is only recoginizing 220MB.
What indicators show only 220M of memory? This problem sounds very
unusual to me. Also 288M seems like a lot of memory for the 770.
After boot the 'dmesg' command will report memory information. That
information will be logged in the /var/log/dmesg file. What
information is logged there?
Here is a sample from one of my systems:
BIOS-provided physical RAM map:
BIOS-e820: 0000000000000000 - 000000000009fc00 (usable)
BIOS-e820: 000000000009fc00 - 00000000000a0000 (reserved)
BIOS-e820: 00000000000e0000 - 0000000000100000 (reserved)
BIOS-e820: 0000000000100000 - 0000000007000000 (usable)
BIOS-e820: 00000000fffe0000 - 0000000100000000 (reserved)
112MB LOWMEM available.
...
Memory: 106320k/114688k available (1499k kernel code, 7864k reserved, 599k data, 256k init, 0k highmem)
It would be useful to see the output from /proc/meminfo.
In particular what does MemTotal show? In the above system with 112M
the system shows the following.
cat /proc/meminfo
MemTotal: 110940 kB
> I tried adding a boot parameter in GRUB using the mem command, but I
> ended up with only 64MB after booting. The command was:
>
> mem=68M@220M
>
> I may be misunderstanding the syntax and have things totally wrong. In fact,
> I would say that is likely considering the results. I appreciate any help
> you can provide.
You probably want to try something more like this instead:
mem=288M
But if tell it more memory than you actually have available it will
cause the system problems.
This is documented in the linux source with various Documentation/*
files such as boot.txt, kernel-parameters.txt, and memory.txt.
A very good resource for ThinkPads is the ThinkWiki.
http://www.thinkwiki.org/wiki/Category:770
Bob
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