Enabling high memory (2GB upgrade) makes system freeze

[juanignaciosl]

I've just upgraded my Acer Travelmate 4002WLMI from 512MB to 2GB. Previous kernel didn't have high memory enabled, so I activated it and recompiled. It boots successfully and detect my brand new RAM, but after some minutes it just freezes... Any ideas?

Previous modules where 333MHz, and new ones are 400, but it should't be a problem, since they're suposed to work underclocked, don't they?

Thanks in advance!

[KiTaSuMbA]

Laptops can be a lot more picky about the RAM they are happy with than desktop boxes... However, since the system actually starts up without any troubles only to freeze later on (presumably while starting to use more of the RAM), I would worry a little bit more about a faulty module rather than incompatible one. Boot from a live-cd that provides a memfree86 test and run it (typically entering "memfree86" on the boot: prompt). Given the extraordinary amount of RAM you got yourself this might take quite some time... so I reccomend a good provision of coffee and reading material to fight against boredom.

If things go smooth, then it's probably some unhappy ratio in the low/hi settings of your kernel (get them back to the typical 1/3 Gb) or some otherwise buggy software (did you change/update anything else?).
_________________
Need to flame people LIVE on IRC? Join #gentoo-otw on freenode!

[juanignaciosl]

First of all, thanks for your detailed response.

More news: yesterday night everything worked fine, so I let the computer running for the whole night (mldonkeying ). In the morning it was still running, so I thought it could've been OpenOffice fault (that was what I was using yesterday during the rebooting season). Nevertheless, when I got home around 3pm it was stuck on a blank screen and, even more disgusting, it won't reboot. I'm just back from the shop where they've put off and on again the memory and it has worked fine.

I tried yesterday to run Knoppix 3.4 boot cd Memtest, but the very moment it started the computer rebooted. I've just emerged Memtest+, and I'll reboot in order to run it. It's my fault not having run it before posting, excuse me. You're right a bad module seems the most probable problem. I don't know if it freezed when it started using the second 1GB module, but it could be too, since it was running OpenOffice, Eclipse, Tomcat and Firefox.

Thanks again. I'm starting Memtest and powering on my Nintendo DS

[juanignaciosl]

Memtest86+ runned for 2 hours and a half with no errors. Tonight I'll do the whole test, but it seems to be correct. Now I've been working for hours with no problem... stay tuned...

[juanignaciosl]

2 days of (not so) hard work and everything running fine... Seems it was something as dumb as a misplaced RAM module or so...