New RAM not recognized - MSI Wind

dbuss1 · 11-08-2012, 09:16 PM

I just got a used MSI Wind U-100, and I put a fresh copy of Crunchbang on it. It only had 1 GB of ram so I put one of these (http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B00...ls_o00_s00_i00) in today to get it up to the max 2GB of RAM.

It wasn't recognizing the RAM, so I ran "dmesg" and I'm getting the message: "AMI Bios detected: BIOS may corrupt low RAM, working around it"...

What's wrong here? I know the msi can have up to 2GB RAM and I made sure I chose the right one. Any ideas?

Thanks

H_TeXMeX_H · 11-09-2012, 02:09 AM

So where are you seeing that it doesn't detect the RAM ?

Check the BIOS and see if it detects it.

Also run:

Code:

cat /proc/meminfo

dbuss1 · 11-09-2012, 01:00 PM

I'm using Crunchbang, it lists the system info on the side, and says I only have 999MB RAM, which is what was there before I put the other GB in.

Code:

MemTotal:        1023064 kB
MemFree:          486604 kB
Buffers:           12908 kB
Cached:           134804 kB
SwapCached:        89172 kB
Active:           229364 kB
Inactive:         267056 kB
Active(anon):     186020 kB
Inactive(anon):   188468 kB
Active(file):      43344 kB
Inactive(file):    78588 kB
Unevictable:          16 kB
Mlocked:              16 kB
HighTotal:        132816 kB
HighFree:            760 kB
LowTotal:         890248 kB
LowFree:          485844 kB
SwapTotal:       1996792 kB
SwapFree:        1892684 kB
Dirty:              1380 kB
Writeback:             0 kB
AnonPages:        286668 kB
Mapped:            90108 kB
Shmem:             25780 kB
Slab:              18796 kB
SReclaimable:      11052 kB
SUnreclaim:         7744 kB
KernelStack:        2152 kB
PageTables:         4140 kB
NFS_Unstable:          0 kB
Bounce:                0 kB
WritebackTmp:          0 kB
CommitLimit:     2508324 kB
Committed_AS:    1206872 kB
VmallocTotal:     122880 kB
VmallocUsed:       10464 kB
VmallocChunk:     106044 kB
HardwareCorrupted:     0 kB
HugePages_Total:       0
HugePages_Free:        0
HugePages_Rsvd:        0
HugePages_Surp:        0
Hugepagesize:       4096 kB
DirectMap4k:      905208 kB
DirectMap4M:           0 kB

H_TeXMeX_H · 11-10-2012, 02:26 AM

So you have two RAM sticks in it now, each 1GB ? What are the specs on the one that was in there ?

You should check the manual or online for RAM sticks that are officially supported by the mobo, because some just won't work. BIOS updates may add more compatibility.

business_kid · 11-10-2012, 10:16 AM

Your memory problem aside, there's a 'shadowing' of the BIOS chip into ram.

Bios chips are flash or EEprom and they are slow by standards (250nS access time for the faster ones, 450nS for the slower ones). To avoid delays, the Bios is copied into ram (A process called 'shadowing').
I think your message may be related to that, if the system is copying into low memory areas.

Shadowing is a good idea for the video only. linux doesn't use the bios much. Anyhow, the kernel is working around it (Marking the memory as used).