Re: Memory Problems on Compaq Prosignia w/Potato

[brian moore <bem@cmc.net>]

On Wed, Feb 07, 2001 at 01:33:17PM -0500, Ian Smith wrote:
> Hi,
> 
> I've just recently installed Potato on a Compaq Prosignia 300 
> Server with 64M of RAM.  Checking free, however, shows only 
> 13M.  The Bios reports the correct amount on startup, and the 
> previous OS (NT) also had no problems with the memory.  I tried 
> adding an append="mem=64M" line to Lilo.conf, but that has not 
> helped.  I thought that the kernel was supposed to autodetect up to 
> 64M anyway.  Should I just do a clean reinstall, or does anyone 
> have an idea of how to fix this?

Check your BIOS configuration for something like 'Memory hole at 15M' or
similar.  This was needed for some old ISA cards that needed to fit
their memory mapped addresses in without conflicting with system memory.
It's highly unlikely you actually have such cards in your system, so you
should disable that setting.

That, of course, assumes that what you're taking about on 'free' is the
'Mem: total' value.   That should be equal to the size of the kernel +
ram in the system.  If you're taking about 'Mem: free', well, that
depends entirely on what you've been running lately and will usually
work its way down to only a few megs regardless of how much RAM you
have.

-- 
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