D
Deleted member 30996
Guest
I've got a Dell Dimension 4600 with a 2.8GHz P4 and 3GB DDR RAM running FreeBSD 9.0-RELEASE. It has the capacity to use up to 4GB RAM but if I install more than 3GB it hangs at the bottom portion of this section during boot:
It still reads the same when I'm running 3GB RAM but proceeds with booting successfully.
I thought it must be due to a bad RAM socket or something until yesterday when I installed an upgrade to my Nvidia card with one that had 512MB RAM on board. When I booted it up I got the same "System memory has changed" message that I do when I've installed a stick of RAM, it was counting the 512MB RAM toward the total system memory, and it again hung at the same place in the boot process, resulting in my having to go back to my old GeForce3 card which again allowed it to boot successfully.
I read up on it and saw where this Dell supposedly needs to run a 64 bit OS to utilize anything over 3GB RAM but am not so sure it wouldn't run 4GB if I disabled ACPI at boot through /boot/device.hints:
I'm ready to try booting it like that but don't want to hose my system where I can't boot it at all, or install FreeBSD-AMD64 if I don't need to as I don't think my P4 supports 64 bits anyway from checking its stats on the Intel site.
I do have another stick of RAM to try it out with but am not sure about this. Any help that could be provided in this situation would be greatly appreciated.
Code:
acpi0: Power Button (fixed)
acpi0: reservation of 0, a0000 (3) failed
acpi0: reservation of 100000, f00000 (3) failed
acpi0: reservation of 1000000, bef70000 (3) failed
Timecounter "ACPI-fast" frequency 3579545 Hz quality 900
It still reads the same when I'm running 3GB RAM but proceeds with booting successfully.
I thought it must be due to a bad RAM socket or something until yesterday when I installed an upgrade to my Nvidia card with one that had 512MB RAM on board. When I booted it up I got the same "System memory has changed" message that I do when I've installed a stick of RAM, it was counting the 512MB RAM toward the total system memory, and it again hung at the same place in the boot process, resulting in my having to go back to my old GeForce3 card which again allowed it to boot successfully.
I read up on it and saw where this Dell supposedly needs to run a 64 bit OS to utilize anything over 3GB RAM but am not so sure it wouldn't run 4GB if I disabled ACPI at boot through /boot/device.hints:
Code:
hint.acpi.0.disabled="1"
I'm ready to try booting it like that but don't want to hose my system where I can't boot it at all, or install FreeBSD-AMD64 if I don't need to as I don't think my P4 supports 64 bits anyway from checking its stats on the Intel site.
I do have another stick of RAM to try it out with but am not sure about this. Any help that could be provided in this situation would be greatly appreciated.