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New RAM not recognized - MSI Wind - "BIOS may corrupt low RAM"

I just got a used MSI Wind U-100, and I put a fresh copy of Crunchbang on it. It only had 1 GB of ram so I put one of these (http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B00...ls_o00_s00_i00) in today to get it up to the max 2GB of RAM.

It wasn't recognizing the RAM, so I ran "dmesg" and I'm getting the message: "AMI Bios detected: BIOS may corrupt low RAM, working around it"...

What's wrong here? I know the msi can have up to 2GB RAM and I made sure I chose the right one. Any ideas?

Thanks

So where are you seeing that it doesn't detect the RAM ?

Check the BIOS and see if it detects it.

Also run:

Code:

cat /proc/meminfo

I'm using Crunchbang, it lists the system info on the side, and says I only have 999MB RAM, which is what was there before I put the other GB in.

Code:

MemTotal:        1023064 kB

MemFree:          486604 kB

Buffers:          12908 kB

Cached:          134804 kB

SwapCached:        89172 kB

Active:          229364 kB

Inactive:        267056 kB

Active(anon):    186020 kB

Inactive(anon):  188468 kB

Active(file):      43344 kB

Inactive(file):    78588 kB

Unevictable:          16 kB

Mlocked:              16 kB

HighTotal:        132816 kB

HighFree:            760 kB

LowTotal:        890248 kB

LowFree:          485844 kB

SwapTotal:      1996792 kB

SwapFree:        1892684 kB

Dirty:              1380 kB

Writeback:            0 kB

AnonPages:        286668 kB

Mapped:            90108 kB

Shmem:            25780 kB

Slab:              18796 kB

SReclaimable:      11052 kB

SUnreclaim:        7744 kB

KernelStack:        2152 kB

PageTables:        4140 kB

NFS_Unstable:          0 kB

Bounce:                0 kB

WritebackTmp:          0 kB

CommitLimit:    2508324 kB

Committed_AS:    1206872 kB

VmallocTotal:    122880 kB

VmallocUsed:      10464 kB

VmallocChunk:    106044 kB

HardwareCorrupted:    0 kB

HugePages_Total:      0

HugePages_Free:        0

HugePages_Rsvd:        0

HugePages_Surp:        0

Hugepagesize:      4096 kB

DirectMap4k:      905208 kB

DirectMap4M:          0 kB

So you have two RAM sticks in it now, each 1GB ? What are the specs on the one that was in there ?

You should check the manual or online for RAM sticks that are officially supported by the mobo, because some just won't work. BIOS updates may add more compatibility.

Your memory problem aside, there's a 'shadowing' of the BIOS chip into ram.

Bios chips are flash or EEprom and they are slow by standards (250nS access time for the faster ones, 450nS for the slower ones). To avoid delays, the Bios is copied into ram (A process called 'shadowing').
I think your message may be related to that, if the system is copying into low memory areas.

Shadowing is a good idea for the video only. linux doesn't use the bios much. Anyhow, the kernel is working around it (Marking the memory as used).