Out of memory while booting?
Jim Kuzdrall
gnhlug at intrel.com
Fri Apr 3 08:08:28 EDT 2009
On Wednesday 01 April 2009 12:59, Charles G Montgomery wrote:
> If anyone has an idea what the problem might be, or just suggestions
> of things to test, that would be greatly appreciated.
A "stuck" (burned out) memory line driver would behave like that if
it affected the upper address lines. In that case, data sent to a
higher address would just overwrite data at a lower address. The line
drivers used to be 8 or 16 bits wide. What you are observing may not
be a genuine out-of-memory detection, but an overwrite of the parameter
table with data intended for elsewhere.
Perhaps memtest86 doesn't look for errors of that sort. I don't
know if Linux has an equivalent of BASIC's POKE and PEEK. If it does,
erase a data word in high memory; set a word in low memory; see if the
word high memory changed. This must be done for every pair of memory
lines. But I suspect memtest86 does this; it is easy enough.
It should not be necessary to run a test for more than one complete
scan of the memory. This problem appears every time. It is a hard
error, not an intermittent error.
You might try to boot DSL (Damn Small Linux) which only requires
16MB of RAM.
Things have changed a lot since I designed computers, but perhaps
this insight will lead to a solution. Please report what you
eventually find.
Jim Kuzdrall
More information about the gnhlug-discuss
mailing list