Problem when doubling my RAM
 

I was wondering if anyone else has encountered a problem before when adding more RAM to their system.

I'm using RH8, with 256 DDR and 509MB of swap, and it works fine,. I just bought another 256 DDR dimm giving me 512 RAM and 509 MB of swap (as I do not know how to change the value), but when my system loads up, and I try to login to Gnome2 I get a segmentation fault, but when I remove the second DIM of DDR everything works fine.

Any suggestions would be appreciated.
thanks

you can run
swapoff <swapdevice>
then mkswap <swapdevice> size
swapon <swapdevice> to change your swap

Bad ram?

Memtest86

I never set more than 128 MB swap, so I doubt that you need more swap.

Nope, ram works fine when I boot win2k
-------------------
mkswap: error: size 1024768 is larger than device size 521608

I guess I'll need to repartion all my drives, thats going to be fun.

thanks for the commands.

Always run memtest86 when installing new ram. It can't hurt and the way windows works is no indication the ram is good.

Run a game and see if you can play for more than an hour without crashing.

Can you compile something in Windows? That is always a good check as that is mem usage heavy.

i meant you could make the swapsize smaller than
the device, to test.
even though it is 500 megs, you could turn it off,
or make it 100 megs or whatever. You don't have to
repartition to make it smaller.

windows uses ram from the top down, and linux
uses it from the bottom up. it used to be that way
though. they could have changed it, but i doubt it.

Does sound like a classic case of faulty ram.

When gnome loaded up in was allocated to the faulty part, parity check failed -- bobs your uncle.

Well the ram is fine, left the memtest program running while I was out doing some errands, and it did 4 passes with 0 errors and 0 ECC's

I'm in gnome now, but I disabled swap, loaded gnome then enabled the swap back to the 509MB, and it seems to be running fine. Need to reboot and see what happens with the swap loaded at startup.

I always thought the swap had to be double the amount of physical ram, turns out I was mis-informed.

cheers.

If you double ram, you need less swap. Current kernels can run with no swap IIRC.

I have 384 MB ram, 128 MB of swap, I am compiling a program, playing music with xmmx, browsing the web, downloading something with wget, running fetchmail, procmail, evolution, tail and probably several things I am forgetting. Memory usage: