# A7N8X Crashing at Memory stage!

## Shiryou

It seems that Linux isnt quite ready for these boards but undaunted, i thought i'd give it a go anyway. Im using the 2.6.3-Love3 sources and I've started with a basic stage 1 install. However, Gentoo crashes very early on. I believe its a memory related thing:

```

511 LOWMEM available.

zapping low mappings.

On node 0  totalpages: 131056

    DMA zone: 4096 pages, LIFO batch:1

    Normal zone: 126960 pages, LIFO batch:16

```

After this, the system hardlocks (i.e numlock does nothing). Does anyone have any ideas? Im totally stumped! ^^;;

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## NeddySeagoon

Shiryou,

I'm using a A7N8X Delux and I don't have your troubles.

You mentioned stage 1, is that what you are doing?

I don't see how you get a 2.6.3-Love3 kernel at stage 1.

What are you doing when you get the messgae ?

If you think its a memory problem, boot the liveCD and run memtest.

I think its probably a kernel config issue

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## Shiryou

I initially started off with a stage 1 install with a kernel source i downloaded from kernel.org. It was a standard 2.6.3 kernel. The problem was still there so i figured the love sources (which apparently seem better for a7n8x boards) might solve it, but not so it seems.

Im not doing anything when i do this message. This message appears straight after the line:

Uncompressing Linux... Ok, booting the Kernel.

BIOS-provided physical RAM map:

.

BIOS-e820: 00000000ffff0000 - 00000000100000000 (reserved)

So its a very early error.

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## NeddySeagoon

Shiryou,

Rebuild your kernel with all power management disabled and the apics disabled. There have been problems reported with both.

Disable power management in the BIOS too.

When you have a kernel that works - narrow down the problem.

Do you know how to have multiple kernels and choose amongst them at boot time.?

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## Shiryou

Yeah the multiple kernels bit shouldnt be too much trouble. Im just a bit miffed that Linux seems to have real problems with this board. Theres LOADS of people on the forums having trouble but all the threads are spread out far and wide. Maybe i should jumble them all together in a big how-to?

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## Wedge_

 *Shiryou wrote:*   

> Im just a bit miffed that Linux seems to have real problems with this board. Theres LOADS of people on the forums having trouble but all the threads are spread out far and wide

 

That's a little unfair - I've been using an A7N8X Deluxe with Gentoo for over a year now, and the biggest problem I've had was probably the random lockups with APIC enabled, which is easily fixed by turning it off or applying a little kernel patch. With all the different possible combinations of hardware it's inevitable that some people are going to have problems. 

Anyway, this this is my current config (2.6.3-love3) if you want to compare.

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## Shiryou

I've been shouted at by my Hero!   :Sad:   Lol, nah sorry about that Wedge. Perhaps a misunderstanding. For a n00b like me finding out which among the massive amount of fixes is a daunting task. I've actually mainly followed your advice. I had planned on trying the APIC patch you mentioned in another thread. I dont blame anyone for all this. I jsut like to think that linux IS as capable and that im simply missing something. Just with this particular setup, its takling a lot more work. I did manage to get everything working fine on my Dell I8200 though.

Cheers for the config! I did want to hunt for it actually since i think my hardware is close to yours. Yeah, i mean, with the LAptop it did take a while but it seems like Linux has taken much better to it than my base unit. STill, cheers for the help   :Smile: 

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## Wedge_

Sorry if that came over the wrong way, I was just trying to say that I think it's a really nice board  :Smile: 

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## Shiryou

Well i dont know what it was you did Wedge but yeah, that config works much better. Cheers! One quick question though.... dont you use devfs? I thought gentoo required that?

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## Wedge_

 *Shiryou wrote:*   

> Well i dont know what it was you did Wedge but yeah, that config works much better. Cheers! 

 

Good to hear it  :Smile: 

 *Shiryou wrote:*   

> One quick question though.... dont you use devfs? I thought gentoo required that?

 

I use udev instead, which is the replacement for devfs now that it's being obsoleted. This thread has some more information on it. If you enable devfs in the kernel config it should still work, so you don't need to switch to udev just yet if you don't want to.

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## Shiryou

Aye yeah, I should have posted this 10 minutes ago. Just found a way of getting UDEV to work on the forums here but thanks for the headsup. I'll give that a look in right now. Thanks for the fix. I wonder what it was?#

Time to look at that Radeon FAQ of yours!   :Very Happy: 

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## Nate_LapT

That ram wouldnt happen to be a stick of Crucial would it?  My current system is the A7N8X Deluxe running a athlon xp 3200 and the ram was Crucial pc3200 512Mb which when memtest86 was ran it came up with a shitload of errors, but when tested with another stick of Crucial 512Mb different  code numbers and the system worked rock stable.  Crucial released a stick of 512 that was soon discontinued after release.  If this seems to be your issue call up crucial and ask for a RMA.  I just recently (less than 5 days ago) mailed mine out, currently waiting for the replacement to arive to run my system at fully speed.

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