From owner-freebsd-questions Sat Oct 28 12:26:55 2000 Delivered-To: freebsd-questions@freebsd.org Received: from mailout04.sul.t-online.com (mailout04.sul.t-online.com [194.25.134.18]) by hub.freebsd.org (Postfix) with ESMTP id 0172637B4CF for ; Sat, 28 Oct 2000 12:26:50 -0700 (PDT) Received: from fmrl03.sul.t-online.de by mailout04.sul.t-online.com with smtp id 13pbcs-00045n-00; Sat, 28 Oct 2000 21:26:46 +0200 Received: from tanja.ncptiddische.net (520077084314-0001@[193.159.148.202]) by fmrl03.sul.t-online.com with esmtp id 13pbce-1xCRUWC; Sat, 28 Oct 2000 21:26:32 +0200 Received: from daniela.ncptiddische.net (daniela.ncptiddische.net [192.168.0.3]) by tanja.ncptiddische.net (8.11.1/8.11.1) with ESMTP id e9SJSrr00337 for ; Sat, 28 Oct 2000 21:29:43 +0200 (CEST) (envelope-from nils@nightcastleproductions.org) Date: Sat, 28 Oct 2000 21:28:05 +0200 (CEST) From: Nils Holland To: questions@freebsd.org Subject: Could it be the memory? Message-ID: MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: TEXT/PLAIN; charset=US-ASCII X-Sender: 520077084314-0001@t-dialin.net Sender: owner-freebsd-questions@FreeBSD.ORG Precedence: bulk X-Loop: FreeBSD.ORG Hi! Well, today I got hold of a user 486-SX computer with 4 MB RAM. I thought I'd get another 4 MB so that I have 8 MB in total, and then I'd install FreeBSD on it. I was already looking forward to building that little "test" machine, but before I could start I ran into a problem: When I try to boot from the 3.4-RELEASE install disks, first everything works fine. After reading from the MFS-root disk, the counter starts counting down before it starks booting the kernel (or, as it is with the install boot disks, the kernel configure dialog). Now, when the counter has reached 0 or I press ENTER, the config dialog does not appear! Instead, the machine reboots! Not so nice, actually! Ok, I thought maybe the installed 4 MB are too little RAM, so I wanted to put some more RAM into the machine. That plan was cancelled, however, when after opening the box I realized that there are some tiny little 30-pin SIMMS inside - and I only have some 72-pin pieces here. Well, what now? I could buy some used RAM to put into that machine - but I'm not even sure that the problem is really related to memory! When booting the machine, it says it has in total 3712 KB inside. Shouldn't that *just* enough to test FreeBSD? So, any suggestions anybody? Can you imagine that too little RAM is really the problem? Or do you think it's probably more likely something else. I already tried changing some settings in the BIOS (well, actually not much can be set there) and it didn't solve the problem. I wouldn't mind if I don't get that machine running - after all I got it basically for free. But another FreeBSD box, no matter how slow, would still be fine ;-) Greetings, Nils Holland ----------------------------------------------------------------- Nils Holland NightCastle Productions * http://www.nightcastleproductions.org ----------------------------------------------------------------- To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org with "unsubscribe freebsd-questions" in the body of the message