On Thursday 30 November 2000 21:39, you wrote:
> In my case, Winblows gets the correct amount of memory...
> Forcing the detection in Lilo as suggested had the impact of freezing the
> system, until I reverted it ...
>
> The problem is hardware related: the kernel does not see the memory, even
> if it is there. I bet my problem is the VIA chipset support in the kernel

Ahh.. Well, we fixed the performance with hdparm and mem=, but now, when the 
disk use is high (like when starting X) the computer freezes, the disk spins 
down and the harddisk light light constantly.  The only thing I can figure is 
that it must be the ide chipset on the mainboard, which is a VIA chipset.  I 
haven't gotten any response from anybody about this, so I'll past the last 
mail below and hope that someone will answer.  If not we'll have to change 
the mainboard.

Previous mail:
I've had a lot of problems installin Linux Mandrake 7.2 at my friends 
computer. �Sent a mail earlier about a problem with the system being terribly 
slow, and got a lot of good help on this, but encountered another problem 
(with might be related?) afterwards. �I'll try to get this as specific as I 
possibly can. �Please read on.

The first problem I had was that the system was terribly slow, especially 
when starting X and other stuff that takes up more memory than just bash. �I 
got two suggestions on how to deal with this; �the first being to add 
"append="mem=128M"" in lilo, something that helped cause the kernel seemed to 
only see 64M. �The second was that I should run hdparm to get the disk in 
32bit mode and to use dma, I checked and the disk was running in 16bit and 
with dma turned off. �So I fixed both of these problems and everything seemed 
to run a lot faster(16/no-dma=64M in 17seconds, 32/dma=64M in 3seconds).

Then when I tried to install a big rpm from disk2 (hadn't started X yet) the 
system freezed. �I could not do anything at all and the harddisk-light light 
constantly without the harddisk doing anything (it spinned down and got 
quiet). �After rebooting the disk wasn't detected in the bios, I had to turn 
off again and then it was detected. I booted up again and tried to start X 
and kde2, but halfway into starting kde2 it locked again. �It seemed after 
more tests that when there was a lot of activitiy on the disk it locked. �I 
now shut off 32bit and dma on the disk believing that this was the problem, 
after more tests I found out it wasn't. �To make sure this wasn't a hardware 
problem we afterwards installed first Windows2k (yuck, yeah I know) and then 
Windows98(even more yuck) and ran extencive tests on both, without getting 
the same problem.

After these tests I decided to try again and installed linux once more but 
still get the same problem.

The specifications on the machine is(it's 2 weeks old btw.):
Mainboard: MSI K7T-Pro 
(http://www.msi-computer.nl/product/mainboard/k7tpro.htm)
Processor: �AMD Duron 700 MHz
Display adapter: �ATI Xpert 2000 32MB AGP
Memory: �128MB original SDRAM pc100
Harddrive: Fujitsu 20.5GB UDMA/66

I also noticed just before I left that the kernel told me that the bus-speed 
was set to 33, and that I could override it with idebus= in lilo, could this 
have anything to do with this?

I really appreciate any help that I could get on this, and if you feel that 
you need some more info, just let me know and I will email it...

Ps. when installing mandrake it always gives me the text-install, never the 
fancy graphical one, is there some problem with the chipset on the display 
adapter?

-- 
\ Christian A Str�mmen /
\ Number1/NumeroUno @ Undernet - Email: [EMAIL PROTECTED] /
\ Web: www.realityx.net - Cell: +47 911 43 948 /
   Live your life by your dreams,
     not by the limits of reality...

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