[EMAIL PROTECTED] (Nguyen Hai Ha) writes: | On Mon, 24 May 1999, Mr. (Ms.) Gary L. Hennigan wrote: | | > It's probably something strange going on with the BIOS function used | > by linux to detect the amount of memory in your computer. I have two | > suggestions you can try: | > | > 1) Manually edit /etc/lilo.conf and add a line like: | > | > append="mem=160M" | > | > or, if you already have an "append" line add it to the line like: | > | > append="floppy=thinkpad,mem=160M" | > | > 2) Alternatively, upgrade to kernel 2.0.36 or higher. Starting with | > 2.0.36 the memory detection uses an extended BIOS call to get the | > amount of memory and this could solve your problem. If Windows can | > properly find the amount of RAM then a Linux kernel >= 2.0.36 will | > also, since they use the same BIOS call. | > | > Gary | > | | Thanks alot for your helpfull advice. I have installed the 2.0.36 | kernel and it seems to work well with the memory but the system | itself is unstable. Sometimes, expecially when I run big programs, | the system comes down with the message like "Segmentation fault". | But when I set the memory to 32M, 64M, or 128M, the system works well. | What does this mean? Could this be a kernel's bug?
Hmm. That sounds a lot like a bad memory chip. I had a very similiar situation over the weekend when one of mine went bad. I'd get unexplained kernel crashes, segmentation faults, and my machine would occasionally lock up hard. After pulling my hair out I decided to set my machine's BIOS to do a full memory test and sure enough it failed. The BIOS test isn't always successful at detecting this, but in my case it was. You can try a much more thorough memory test program available in the hwtools Debian package. Install hwtools and read /usr/doc/hwtools/README.debian, looking specifically at memtest86. You boot into it directly from a floppy. See if it shows anything. One last suggestion would be to tell Linux to use 1MB less than you actually have using: append="mem=159MB" in your /etc/lilo.conf file. I've seen reports that this often helps with memory problems like you're describing. Gary
