What I can do for 2 more Gbs of Ram
“Living with your girlfriend requires a lot of ram” is what i thought when i bought 2 bars of ram (to reach 4 gb in total) last week.
Starring:
- Me (the Nerdest)
- My Girlfriend (the light in the 64bit darkness)
- My ex ArchLinux 32 bit system
- My Motherboard, a GigaByte GA-MA69VM-S2 with an old bios F2
It was a rainy sunday morning in Italy when the nerdest Cagnulein tried to upgrade his system to 4 gigabytes of ram.
The system booted up fine, but `free` it wasn’t ok with it.
#free -m
total used free shared buffers cached
Mem: 3291 801 2489 0 95 342
-/+ buffers/cache: 363 2927
Swap: 1906 0 1906
Uhm..uhm…after 2 seconds of googling i’ve discovered the truth: 32 bit aren’t comfortable with >3 gb ram (within using PAE (kernel-pae on archlinux 2.6.31 hangs my system
))
Mmmh..maybe it’s time to port my system to the undiscovered universe of 64 bit!
I’ve found a nice howto on the archlinux wiki which explains how to port an arch32 to an arch64 without formatting.
– Coding coding –
During the very first boot with the kernel26 for 64bit THEY appeared.
ata3: SATA link up 3.0 Gbps (SStatus 123 SControl 300)
ata3.00: qc timeout (cmd 0xec)
ata3.00: failed to IDENTIFY (I/O error, err_mask=0x104)
It was 11 A.m. (i’ve started at 9 A.m.), and i felt terrible. Have you ever tried a “nerd stomacache”?
It’s the feeling generated by a failure in your home nerd system…it’s just after a broken heart (i have to say so, my girlfriend will read this post
).
It seems doesn’t work, right? So, i’ve took a 2008.03 livecd of archlinux and i’ve rebooted.
Now, chrooting i was able to reinstall a 32bit kernel.
Without ideas, i thought about download a 64bit archlinux livecd.
– downloading –
Downloaded, burned and booted.
Livecd works.
How does it possible? What are the differences?
- Livecd use a 2.6.30 (version of kernel) against 2.6.31 on the repositories.
- Livecd could maybe be have a different .config
- Livecd are blessed by Torvalds
So, i decided to find out a package contains the same version of linux and give it a try.
Nothing, it’s not the version…
“Maybe it’s something on my harddrive that causes this behaivour!, FORMAT!!!!!”
“No wait, FORMAT WHAT? Are you insane? Your data? Backup, logs? Do you think about all of these?”
After 20 minutes passed staring the f**king error, i’ve choosen: “BACKUP && FORMAT && RESTORE”.
– backuped, installed, partitioned, downloaded, rebooted –
SAME ERROR
“No way, i can’t believe. Is it real? Am i dreaming?”
Without energies, passion and less nerd then ever, i’ve decided to give it a break.
I’ve to contact my “Linux inside”…watching Big Bang Theory
No i can’t, i can’t leave my family without a server, not me!
So i’ve restarted to googling..and after a bit what did i found? This: same issue with vista 64bit related to a non-update bios version of the same motherboard.
Sincerely, i’ve already watched the bios page of the motherboard, but i didn’t find nothing releated a ram or a SATA issues.
Gigabyte Changes Log
Gigabyte Support Page
But it works, OMG it works!
Now, why did they choose to doesn’t write it up? Fear? Lazyness? Write your opinion.
Forse alcuni si ricorderanno di
La mia vita, la mia passione, i miei primi amori: sono tutti racchiusi nei telefilm.
Mio padre venerdì doveva andare a ritirare una cazzo di carta in un cazzo di posto per una cazzo di cosa. Non e’ importante l’obbiettivo, piu’ importanti sono le modalita’. Gli era stato dato un appuntamento per venerdì 13/06/2008 alle 16.45. Cosa dovrebbe fare una persona…no, non una persona normale, una qualsiasi persona? Andarci all’ora prefissata (magari 15 minuti prima tanto per essere lì pronti al momento dell’appuntamento n.d.r.), nel giorno prefissato, nel luogo prefissato.
I bagni. Guarda che sono strani i bagni? Cioe’ cazzo alla fine i bagni dovrebbero avere l’importanza che ne so’ di una camera da letto o di una cucina se consideriamo il tempo che ci passiamo all’interno. Ma invece queste povere stanze vengono spesso bistrattate dai ristoranti e dai luoghi pubblici.
Ma quanto sono nerd? Cioe’ cazzo se sono arrivato al punto di partire così con un post, vuol dire che ormai sto raggiungendo il limite…


Recent Comments