support for 6G memory
 

Hi,

I have a E6550 dual core system. So long, it has happily worked with versions of 32 bit ubuntu and 2G ram. However, no the ram was upgraded to 6G. Unfortunately, I am uable to access more than 3.5G. Whatever else I have tried, it results to random hangups during boot. I have enabled 64G support for 32bit kernel, and attempted to install debian, ubuntu, and opensuse 64 bit versions. (the CD-s boot fine on my laptop with 2G ram).

Any idea how to test the issues? I have looked at BIOS, but besides of memory timing and similar (which I have no clue about), there is nothing interesting. Once I retrieved the syslog for 32bit 64G kernel but that was uninformative as well.

The computer has 2 video cards, otherwise pretty standard hardware.

Thanks,
Ott

1) Have you ensured that your system bios is capable of handling that much memory?

2) Systems with more than 4GB memory need to use a high-memory support enabled kernel. Debian offers -himem compiled kernels, and I'd be surprised if the other distros didn't have similar offerings.

The motherboard supports 8G.

During startup, the bios tells something like "memory testing 6 ... ..." i.e. 6G. So it sort-of recongnizes it.

I will try to look at 32bit high-mem kernels.

Thanks,
Ott

you need a PAE kernel.

PAE is only necessary for 32 bit. 64bit should have support for far more memory.

However, none of these should hang during boot...

Is your new memory OCZ (brand name) by any chance? I have built several systems with new OCZ memory which hung during boot until the "Enable Report of memory errors" was turned off in BIOS. The systems work quite well with Ubuntu Server and Desktop and I've never had the problem since. This may not be a solution for you, but it is something that worked with my problem.

Good Luck.

Has to be hardware - move the memory around 1 slot at a time and see if you can isolate the error to one card and/or slot on the motherboard.
Have you run memtest - for at least a day ??.

I will second Syg00 memtest suggestions. Did you pull all the old memory and install new or did you just add in new sticks? Mixing memory sticks can be a tricky business, if the ram timings, voltages, etc are different or sometimes just a different batch of memory(not to mention different brands) things tend not to work quite right.

thanks for correcting me.

BIOS upgrade seems to have done the trick... It is an ASUS P5N-E SLI motherboard. I upgraded from BIOS 0505 to 1301 and now 64 bit ubuntu runs fine.

Thanks for suggestions!
Ott