Andrei Popescu wrote:
On Sat, Mar 01, 2008 at 07:33:05PM +0000, andy wrote: I installed memtester, memtest86, and memtest86+. Added the second RAM chip and booted up into single user mode. Ran memtester and allocated 2040MB of memory. It ran for a while and went into kernel panic. I copied the following down by hand from what I could read from the screen. I hope that something might be useful as a diagnostic, but as most of this is way beyond my ken, I ask for some help in deciphering this: 501 pages pagetables 512000 pages of RAM 282624 pages of HIGHMEM 4995 reserved pages 29 pages shared 416955 pages swap cached 0 pages dirty 0 pages write back 0 pages mapped 1747 pages slab 501 pages pagetable Out of memory and a list of processes being killed kernel panic - not syncing: out of memory and no killable processes I have yet to run either memtest86 or 86+ because from reading some notes on the web it looks like it can take up to 12 hours to run and I don't have that kind of time right now, so will have to do it overnight during the week so it can run into the next day. I do know that memtest86 is already in my /boot/grub/menu.lst, but perhaps I am supposed to uncomment it? This does seem to be making surprisingly heavy weather of an issue that given today's cheapness of additional memory would have been factored into a modern kernel. As far as I can establish, the fault is not a hardware fault - I have used 1 RAM chip in either of the 2 slots (there are only two slots on the board), and have used three different RAM chips singly as well as in combination across both slots. There may well be other hardware tests to conduct, but I would have thought that my simple exercise of switching the chips around and using different slots would have brought up any immediate errors. The boot process (is that pre-GRUB or GRUB stage 1?) shows the correct amount of RAM each time, and there doesn't appear to be anything in the BIOS settings that would allow me to change RAM-related configuration. Finally, when I bought this machine, the specs stated that it was upgradeable to 2 GB DDR2 pc533 RAM, which is what I am using. I appreciate your sticking with me on this Andrei. Cheers Andy -- "If they can get you asking the wrong questions, they don't have to worry about the answers." - Thomas Pynchon, "Gravity's Rainbow" |