Still can't get 4GB

Tuesday, January 10th, 2006

I tried again to get my AMD64 3800 in an MSI K8N Neo 4-F motherboard to recognize more than 2GB. After all, the board says that it supports up to 4GB and I have these 4 sticks of 1GB RAM from Corsair sitting here…

I tried loading the RAM, adjusting the BIOS to enable memory hole remapping and then booted into Ubutu Breezy Badger. It never made it through the process of starting services. I tried a few times and it would either reboot or lock up at different places while starting services.

I went back into BIOS and tried nudging up the memory voltage. I only went up one notch to 2.70 (I think… I didn’t make a note of the value). The bios gave a set of green values, yellow values, and red values. I selected the highest yellow value.

Same problem.

At this point, I took out 2GB and gave up for the night. But at this point when I tried to reboot, I couldn’t get X to start. It gave me Sig 11 errors. Ugh. I fiddled with temporary files, and permissions and eventually got nuclear and removed all the xserver-xorg packages and reinstalled them.

That got me back on track. It was even smart about saving my tweaked xorg.conf file so my closed-source nvidia driver still worked.

But back to the drawing board for getting the board to accept 4GB.