The other possibility is that you have to set a jumper on the
motherboard to let the bios know that the memory is there. I remember
struggling with this years ago, and then noticing just beside the SIMM
socket there was a jumper to set the memory size.
HTH
Paul
main-request(a)lists.alug.org.uk wrote:
>Message: 1
>From: "Glen Tyler" <glen.tyler(a)tesco.net>
>To: <main(a)lists.alug.org.uk>
>Date: Sun, 29 Dec 2002 14:05:19 -0000
>Subject: [Alug] over-riding BIOS memory detection
>
>Dear All,
>can anyone help/put me straight on this.
>I have a i486 machine running Slackware 8.1. As a christmas present I bought
>it a 32MB Simm, it currently has 16MB installed (one module). When I
>replaced the 16MB with the 32MB the bios still only detects 16MB on boot and
>everything runs as before. No matter I thought - I have read somewhere that
>Linux will override such settings, but I have been unable to get the kernel
>(2.4.18) to do so.
>I read the lilo.conf man page which indicated that adding 'append="mem=32M"'
>to lilo would do it, but the computer would not boot after adding this. A
>further search of the internet produced a sort of How-to doc that lists
>three options (but I think is written for RedHat). The first of these is the
>same as the lilo.conf recommendation, the second involves giving mem sizes
>and start locations in hexadecimals e.g.
>append="mem=exactmap mem=0x9f000@0 mem=0x1f00000@100000" and the third is
>like the 2nd, but in english..
>append="mem=exactmap mem#=640K@0 mem=31M@1M"
>all these end in the same result - failure to boot. I have tried these
>messages specifying 16MB as the memory size (incase there really was a
>problem with the 32MB size) but the result is the same.
>In the mini how-to it is suggested that white space is needed between the
>start quotes and the first mem statement - but that doesn't resolve this
>problem either.
>So - am I correct in assuming that the Linux kernel can use this additional
>16MB of memory , and if so how do I let it know its there?
>
>all the best
>
>Glen
>
>
>