where did my ram go?

nakkaya · 02-25-2003, 05:12 PM

i got 256 mb of ram but my box sees it as 249 mb i am just curious where did my 6 mb went? any suggestions?

MasterC · 02-25-2003, 07:35 PM

Check your BIOS, see if it's recognizing all your RAM. You might have a few bad blocks on the stick. Check out a program called memtest86:
http://freshmeat.net/projects/memtes...c_id=861%2C146

Cool

nakkaya · 02-25-2003, 08:36 PM

my bios recognizing all my ram thats a 1 mount old laptop it should not have a bad stick

MasterC · 02-25-2003, 09:31 PM

Yeah, but you might wanna run memtest on it just to make sure. Other options are passing it to your kernel, but first check to see if it's a bad stick, easiest way first, then move onto harder things

Cool

finegan · 02-25-2003, 10:17 PM

A memory fry error that would make 6 megs disappear would probably render the stick useless... What's reporting it as 249Mb? Remember, RAM is not perfectly linear, and whatever proggy you have reporting back 249 may be using some funky combination of 1000=1k and 1052=1k

Cheers,

Finegan

nakkaya · 02-25-2003, 10:45 PM

gkrellm is reporting as 249 mb

finegan · 02-25-2003, 10:49 PM

I'm not familiar with gkrellm's metric, what does "free" report?

Cheers,

Finegan

nakkaya · 02-25-2003, 10:53 PM

254888 thx i think i don have problem its correct.

finegan · 02-27-2003, 01:37 AM

That is curious, its about 4096 shy of where its supposed to be... I'm stumped man, a ram bank can't die without bringing down the rest of the stick in an ugly tailspin... there are some differences between sticks, but that's a lot not accounted for, unless you have a RAM stealing video card? There are so many differences in the RAM market, low density, high density, CAS-2, CAS-2.5, who knows if they're messing about with what they consider 1Mb in the maelstrom of all of these statistics... if it runs right it can't be that big a deal?

Cheers,

Finegan

R0N1N · 02-27-2003, 12:09 PM

No i don't think you are missing any ram or have a hardware problem. I bet you have onboard video. yes?

It is using that memory for the onboard video card.

nakkaya · 02-27-2003, 01:32 PM

i got on board video but it doesnt share with my ram

bobo_daclown · 02-27-2003, 07:57 PM

if you have onboard video, the bios allocates some of your system memory as video ram. otherwise, you have NO VIDEO MEMORY. impossible

finegan · 02-27-2003, 08:01 PM

Quote:

Originally posted by nakkaya
i got on board video but it doesnt share with my ram

Actually, you and the other guys may be both right... That didn't make any sense... Okay, You have normal onboard video with its own chunk of memory on the board, but they tend to steal a couple megs of normal RAM for framebuffering, see if that's the case... you can probably adjust it down to 1Mb in BIOS if I'm not on crack here.

Cheers,

FInegan

nakkaya · 02-27-2003, 10:06 PM

it reports 249(gkrellm)
video card has 16 mb of memory
so it has its own memory

xYko · 02-28-2003, 03:08 AM

It's probably the manufacturer that didn't put all of it on the stick. They use all kinds of tricks to save cash nowadays..
Like buying an 80 gigabytes hd just to find out its actually 80 billion bytes, which is 74 and not 80 gig.. I guess they've started doing that on memory too