[Techtalk] RAM on RH7.0

[Maria Blackmore]

On Thu, 19 Jun 2003 illini.engineer at att.net wrote:
> The laptop BIOS does recognize the correct amount.
> 
> I added the line above to lilo.conf, saved the file, ran  lilo, then rebooted.
> Now Linux won't boot up. Windows98 still boots up fine.

Hmm, that's interesting.

> I'm stuck. 

I see, i think I know what's happening though.

It sounds to me like you have a graphics card in the laptop which is
nabbing some main memory for itself.

> I'll have to wait until I get home to search for my rescue/boot disk to 
> put things back to the way they were. I think I have one.

That's ok, you don't need to do this

> I don't understand why this happened though. Adding the line seemed
> very straightforward.

See above, no matter, it's easy to deal with

> Any ideas?

When you get the LILO prompt, tap a key to stop the count down to boot, if
you don't have a count down, hold down the ALT key to tell it to stop and
display the menu.  The default boot option should be highlighted in the
menu, and you should have a lilo prompt in the lower left.

At this point, you need to tell it to start loading, but override the
append line from lilo.conf.  So, at the prompt type in the boot option
name, and then follow that with mem=159M, if it still crashes on boot, try
158M, 157M, etc until you find a value it boots with.

eg, if your default boot option is "linux", type this

linux mem=159M

You should, after a short time, find the right value, and your laptop will
boot :)

If you don't find one that works, then you've got something a little more
weird going on, so let us know, and we'll will have a little collective
think.

Maria