Re: Fresh 7.10 netinstall problems...
On Thu, Mar 13, 2008 at 10:19:09PM +0000, digbyt@skaro.afraid.org wrote:
> On Sat, Oct 27, 2007 at 05:30:49PM +0100, Digby Tarvin wrote:
> I have now had time to get back to investigating this, and after a
> systematic test of all the differences between the 486 config and
> the unstable 686 config, I have discovered that the critical item
> was the setting for High Memory Support. In the 486 Kernel this
> is set to 'off', and for the 686 kernel it is set to '4GB'.
>
> When running the (stable) 486 kernel I get the dmesg message:
> Warning only 896MB will be used.
> Use a HIGHMEM enabled kernel.
> 896MB LOWMEM available.
>
> Having identified that this setting determines if my kernel will be
> stable or not, I then tried booting the default (686) kernel with
> the boot option 'mem=896M' (foregoing the top 128MB or ram)
>
> Sure enough, the full pentium Debian kernel is now stable!
>
> Still trying to find a way to determine if this indicates a fault
> in this machine, or some subtle compatability issue with it.
>
> If anyone has any idea what might be causing this particular fault I
> would be most intetested to hear. I would have thought some bad ram
> would have been detected by the BIOS or the install disk memory tests.
> And I am told that the Windows system which it came with runs without
> any problem. I wonder if there is anything about the way HIGHMEM is
> used that would show up some subtle flaw in this machine?
What happens if you swap memory around in the box. If it causes errors
on your previously-stable kernel, then that's a sign. What happens if
you install memtest+ which puts a line in grub's menulist so that you
can boot into pure memtest and let it cook for a couple of days?
Doug.
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