installing freebsd: only detects 4mb ram

Dan Nelson dnelson at allantgroup.com
Sat May 21 00:13:54 PDT 2005


In the last episode (May 21), Etienne Ledoux said:
> ok, a long time ago I installed freebsd on an old beast. it has been
> faithfull to me for a few years now. I want to reinstall it with
> 5.4STABLE (not upgrade, I want to start fresh). But it only detects
> 4mb of ram. it actually has 98mb of ram and I remember I had to
> recompile the kernel to get freebsd to detect the rest of the ram.
> but i can't remember how i managed to install it. I see the faq says
> I need 5mb and for 5x I need 8mb. I can't put the drives in another
> system because it's an old compaq raid array and I have no machine
> where these drives would fit into. Is there any other possible way to
> install this machine ? perhaps over nfs ? or a paramater at boot to
> detect the rest of the ram ?

Old Compaq machines are notorious for not reporting the right amount of
RAM.  Before the kernel loads, hit space and enter "setenv
hw.physmem=98M" at the the loader prompt, then "boot".  Once you're
installed FreeBSD, you can add "hw.physmem=98M" to /boot/loader.conf
instead of recompiling.

-- 
	Dan Nelson
	dnelson at allantgroup.com


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