# PAE support for +4G ram memory on HP Mini 311 [SOLVED] ?

## 3igHankCh0w

I have an HP mini 311 with an Intel N280 atom processor. I have installed a 4G ram chip, this along with the 1G that is on the mother board gives me 5G of ram memory. The bios can see this but I cannot see it in the gentoo installation. cat /proc/meminfo shows total memory 3366260 and as I said the bios shows 5120M. I have enabled pae in the kernel and selected the +64G option is there something else iI need to do to be able to access the extra ram? Thank You to all who view and or reply.

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## eccerr0r

What chipset does the machine use?  The 945GM is limited to 4GB physical but a lot of that is needed for MMI/O devices...

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## 3igHankCh0w

If I understand you correctly it is an nVidia MPC79. I also checked with HP's web site and the info there stated the mini 311 could handle 5G of ram and that is what is showing in the bios. Here is the output when I run free

ta33ers zasa # free

Mem:   total  3366260      used  698772    free 2667488      shared  0      buffers  156968     cached  223660

-/+ buffers/cache:     used  318144   free 3048116

swap:  total 2097148      used   0    free  2097148

Sorry for the post but no mater what I do it crams the info together.

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## eccerr0r

A cursory google search says max RAM is 3GB on the machine, not sure why it's different from different sources.

Many chipsets  don't support mapping over 4GB.  It can tell how much RAM is in the machine by the SMBUS...

My 4GB machines I need PAE64G to see all 4GB in 32-bit mode, and it seems to be all that's needed to enable all 4GB.  I have a G965 and P43 chipset boards that do support more than 4GB RAM but I suspect the G965 will complain if I stick 8GB (it will say something like 7.3GB I bet...)

You can use the  [ code ] [ / code ] tags to make it print spaces and print in monospace.

```
             total       used       free     shared    buffers     cached

Mem:       4148272    2406288    1741984          0         28    1675960

-/+ buffers/cache:     730300    3417972

Swap:      4194300     113624    4080676

```

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## NeddySeagoon

3igHankCh0w,

"Handle" covers a multitude of sins.  It means that if you plug in a 4G stick, it will still boot. Unlike mu Acer Aspire One, that will not boot with more than a 1G stick installed.

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## 3igHankCh0w

Here is where I got the information and as I have said the bios for the HP Mini 311 is showing 5120mb of ram is there another kernel option I nead to select other than pae +64G

***** ***  ***

Re: HP Mini 311 Ram Upgrade,,,​,,[ Edited ] .Options 

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....07-01-2011 06:55 AM - last edited on 07-01-2011 06:56 AM 

Hi:

Please see page 1-2 of the service manual for your notebook below:

http://h10032.www1.hp.com/ctg/Manual/c01898746.pdf

You can install up to one 4GB DDR3 PC3-10600 (PC1333) memory module.

Paul ..

***********************

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## Jaglover

Looking at the page 1-2 ... it states clearly Mini 311 takes additional 2048 MB, only Pavilion dm1 takes 4096 MB.

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## 3igHankCh0w

I finally see the checkmarks DUH! when I looked at it the first time I did not notice them, but it still seems strange that the system bios recognizes the 5G of ram.

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## eccerr0r

Most machines will look through the IIC/SMBUS to query what memory modules are installed in each slot, add them up, and print the sum.  It does not necessarily check them completely nor can it actually map all the memory in some location that's usable by the processor.

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