Re: Fighting some install issues with a new box -- last possibility, memory size ...

[oconnell at soe.ucsd.edu (Sean O'Connell)]

On Mon, 2005-07-25 at 22:23 -0500, William A. Mahaffey III wrote:
> Bryan J. Smith wrote:
> 
> >One last possibility.
> >
> >When the first Opteron mainboards came out with the AMD8131 tunnel, Tyan
> >had an issue when 4GiB of RAM was used.  They recommended you enable the
> >memory hole.
> >
> >That issue should be _long_removed_ in the S2895, but it probably
> >wouldn't hurt to enable any memory hole (above 3.65GiB), or actually
> >remove 2GiB of RAM and see if it sees the card and its firmware in the
> >BIOS (as well as Linux).
> >
> >If so, get Tyan on the phone.  You should _not_ be seeing that.
>
> I 2nd that motion (remove 2 GB of RAM), I am also on the SuSE AMD64 list 
> & there are dozens of threads about people having install problems with 
>  > 2 GB of RAM onboard during install. They have various recommendations 
> to get around it (noapic during install, others, I don't recall them 
> all), but get down to 2 GB RAM or less seems to cure a multitude of ills 
> during install.
> 

OK. But here's the problem. What difference will removing 2GB of Ram
make any difference once the machine is back up and running with 4GB of
RAM. I would feel better if the PCI bus actually saw the card. I will
try doing a few things tomorrow:

1) Try moving the 3Ware card from the 133MHz slot to one of the 66MHz
slots and see if linux sees the card.
2) I will possibly try removing 2GB of RAM and see if things magically
start working :)
3) I'll poke around in the BIOS some more and reread the kernel
parameters list again and see if something obvious appears.
 
-- 
Sean O'Connell
Office of Engineering Computing         oconnell@xxxxxxxxxxxx
Jacobs School of Engineering, UCSD      858.534.9716 (49716)