New RAM not recognized on Toshiba laptop
 

I'm a newbie, but am looking to live a Redmond-free life.
I installed Fedore Core 1 (with GNOME) on an old Toshiba Satellite 2595CDS (400Mhz, 64MB RAM, 4.3G). Needless to say, it runs slowly. So I picked up a 128MB card (official Toshiba from Kingston) and installed it, but it is not being recognized.

I used
cat /proc/meminfo
to see how much memory the machine was recognizing, and it returned about 64MB.

So I modified the second GRUB boot command by adding
mem=192M

This resulted in an error - I can't remember it exactly - like "can not be contained", and it did not boot.

Any suggestions to get this memory online would be great.

Also, I tried some lighter desktop apps like Xfce and fvwm, but as an XP user at work, I really like all the context menus and conveniences of the GNOME gui. Plus, I already dropped the coin on the memory card.

Thanks,
JB

"So I modified the second GRUB boot command by adding
mem=192M

This resulted in an error - I can't remember it exactly - like "can not be contained", and it did not boot."

Does your hardware set aside some memory as video memory? If so then you need to subtract the video memory from mem=192M.

Another possibility is that you could try to reverse the positions of the two memory sticks. In some hardware when you have memory sticks of unequal size the larger memory stick has to come first.

-----------------------------
Steve Stites

Have you tried just running with the 128 mb only?

As it's a laptop, there's a memory expansion slot (on the bottom of the computer, where I loaded the 128M) and a "built in" 64M. So I don't know if I can switch the physical positions of these cards. I haven't taken the whole box apart.

I can look into the video memory but I'm not sure where to start to do that in Linux.

"I can look into the video memory but I'm not sure where to start to do that in Linux."

The amount of RAM used as video memory is specified in your BIOS. Look through your BIOS to see if any RAM is set aside as video memory.

-----------------------------
Steve Stites

So the BIOS is only recognizing the 64MB. I got in there and was unable to edit the memory amount. I updated the BIOS from the Toshiba website, but no dice. It does not specify any video memory, either, but regardless, the memory upgrade is not recognized. I double checked to make sure I had installed it correctly, and everything seems tight.

What a bummer. I was hoping to resurrect this old dog.

In your XF86Config under /etc/X11 add VideoRam 65536 (or was it VideoRam "65536") anywhere between Section "Device" and EndSection.

The speed of the computer also depends on the hard drive too, so you may want to ask the techs at Toshiba if you can add a hard drive with 7200 RPM. This will really speed up the notebook.

Does the BIOS detect all the memory that you have. If it does not then thats your problem. Call the tech support for that.

Thanks for all of the help. After talking with tech support at both Toshiba and the manufacturer of the memory card, it seems that the problem is not software related, but is either a dead card or a dead slot.

I did learn a lot troubleshooting, though.

Thanks again,
JB