i have an old HP that had 128M of RAM, i just added 256 more, but when i booted my machine and ran free -m it still shows 128. is there something else i need to do?

thanks.

I have some old machines that I have recently tried to upgrade the memory on. They all had one 16 MB stick of 128 pin DIMMS. I added another 16 MB, and got to 32, then I found a 128 MB stick, and added that to a 16, but only ended up with 48, the same as when I used 32 and 16. I have not been able to find 32 MB in my (rural) neck of the woods. In talking to the guy at the computer store, it seems that there are hardware limitations in some of the older MoBs that do not allow more than ? 64MB in some.

HTH
Steve

That and also the larger memory should be in slot one i think.

You should always look into this stuff before you buy parts.

Yeah, I know, but where I am, I know the store owner so well, I can just take the part back, as I did with the 128Megs!

Also, some of the parts are so old, the only way to find out seems to be trial and error!

Steve

Some older BIOSes couldn't properly report memory sizes greater than 128MB. (I thought that the newer versions of the kernel didn't trust the BIOS and figured the memory size out themselves.)

I haven't tried doing it this way, but you could try entering a command at the ``boot:'' prompt like:

linux mem=384M

and see what happens. If that works and if you're booting via LILO, you can add the line:

append="mem=384M"

to your lilo.conf file and rerun /sbin/lilo so that the next bootstrap will automatically enter that ``mem='' option for you.. (If you're grub user, there's got to be a similar option.)

If manually telling Linux about the memory doesn't work, then it appears that the m'board isn't accepting it. Some older systems required installing memory in sets of two or four. Could this be a problem?

Hope this helps,
Rick