Help - Missing memory.

[samdavid6]

Hey everyone. I am having an absolute rotten day. Argh

I have a home pc, I put it together myself.

It was a Gigabyte MA770T-UD3P board with an AMD Phenon II X4 955 Black Edition processor coupled with an OCZ 500w power supply. Other internals are a GeForge GT220 video card, a 300Gb drive, 1Tb drive and a DVD writer. It had 2GB of RAM (Kingston ValueRam KVR133D3N9).

The other day I decided to install an additional 4Gb of RAM. My board has 4 memory slots, with the 2GB RAM in slot 1. Since my board recommends putting similar RAM together, I put the two 2GB sticks (PATRIOT Sector 5 PGV34G1333ELK sticks in slots 3 and 4). The PATRIOT sticks are bigger than the norm, so I have to put them there since the CPU cooler prohibits me from putting them in slots 1 or 2.

Power On, the BIOS shows 6Gb of RAM. And it boots and comes to the login screen, but the Keyboard isnt working. Ok, so shut down and restart, but nothing this time the system doesnt even POST. One light comes on and I can hear a hard drive make a read/write sound but the CPU fan doesnt come on either (even when the heatsink becomes pretty hot). So I shut it down thinking power is inadequate and disconnect the DVD drive. Power On, and nothing. Same disk sounds but nothing else.

Remove my old RAM - the Kingston, leaving the PATRIOT in there. This time, system boots. So I shut down the system thinking I can just use 4GB ram and hook up the DVD writer. System comes on, but now there's no Keyboard. Argh. Shut down and restart and again the system doesnt POST. After trying things on and off again, I finally get DVD and Keyboard working and everything is fine and dandy. However, now System monitor only shows the system showing 2.7GB RAM instead of the required 4GB.

Is the power supply inadequate? I looked up the specs for other power supplies (upto 750W) but they all show that they provide the same wattage 155W to the 3.3v cable.

Any ideas people? I tried everything, and am clueless.

[Horusrogue]

Is the arch linux 32 bit or 64 bit? I think they offer both.

Use matched pairs of ram. Less problems. Also using most or all the ram slots can cause interesting power (voltage) issues. May be why its working with only the 4.

The memory read is then NORMAL for 32, but wrong for 64.

[samdavid6]

Ah its a 32bit. I dont think the OS has anything to do with it, since half the time all I get is the power light and some repetitive disk sounds, and it doesnt even bring up the BIOS or POST.

Thanks for the assistance, I really appreciate it.

I will try to clear the BIOS and restart, if that doesnt work, I will take everything apart and put it all back together.

[Tyree]

Mixing RAM brands/specs is never recommended and is always a crap shoot.
Patriot RAM is known for having compatibility problems with many Mobo's. OCZ-G.Skill-Corsair are good RAM and generally have less compatibility issues.
I would suggest testing the Patriot with MemTest 86.

[Horusrogue]

Yea, sorry, I read up there at you got it to work with only 4 GB but the OS only saw so much. You will not get all 4 gb with a 32bit OS. See if they have a 64bit version.

[samdavid6]

I feel like an idiot. Sorry about that folks. I should have known about the OS not supporting more than 2.7GB (well 3GB - the video memory).

I installed the 64bit Arch Linux yesterday, have all 6Gb RAM (w00h00) and its so fast.

I got around the hardware issues by disconnecting everything, removing the battery off the board, setting the clear CMOS jumper, waiting 10 minutes to clear everything.

I then only installed the memory. All 6GB of it and it went into setup where it detected all the memory.

I then reinstalled one piece of hardware at a time until I had everything in there. Seems fine now. Only one small bug, which is that the keyboard sometimes just goes off. No NumLock light or anything. I cant do much else other than reset the computer and start it again. If anyone knows why this may be happening, do let me know, otherwise, I'll look around for a USB keyboard, since all my USB stuff seems to be working perfectly.

[Horusrogue]

PS/2 port might be failing, if USB keyboard works fine consistently, I wouldn't worry. of course, I may be wrong, but without software dumps (or linux log parsing) I cannot determine the issue.

[Horusrogue]

Originally Posted by samdavid6

I feel like an idiot. Sorry about that folks. I should have known about the OS not supporting more than 2.7GB (well 3GB - the video memory).

I installed the 64bit Arch Linux yesterday, have all 6Gb RAM (w00h00) and its so fast.

I got around the hardware issues by disconnecting everything, removing the battery off the board, setting the clear CMOS jumper, waiting 10 minutes to clear everything.

I then only installed the memory. All 6GB of it and it went into setup where it detected all the memory.

I then reinstalled one piece of hardware at a time until I had everything in there. Seems fine now. Only one small bug, which is that the keyboard sometimes just goes off. No NumLock light or anything. I cant do much else other than reset the computer and start it again. If anyone knows why this may be happening, do let me know, otherwise, I'll look around for a USB keyboard, since all my USB stuff seems to be working perfectly.

Don't worry about it! I am so happy that you have a working system (I love linux btw, I use more than ubuntu (xubuntu) when possible...its so limiting at times [aka I have tried installing arch but my old hardware has issues :P]) and I actually got it bang on :)