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@lists.alug.org.uk wrote:

Message: 1 From: "Glen Tyler" glen.tyler@tesco.net To: main@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