Arch Linux

miagu

Member

Registered: 2018-02-02

Posts: 2

Old laptop boots only with 2GB of RAM

Hello to everybody.

Recently I obtained for free a working old Samsung NP-R510 laptop, originally running Vista, so of course I wiped it and installed ArchLinux.
This has 2 slots for DDR3 PC5300, and I managed to get two 2GB sticks from different vendors with same specs.
The problem is that the boot process won't complete: Grub loads, then kernel starts loading, then it suddenly reboot.
The only way to have it complete the boot is to only use 2GB of RAM, either phisically (using one of the two slots) or by mem=2G kernel parameter.
I've run memtest for some hours and it did not detect any error.
I've tried swapping slots etc. in every possible combination, but the only way to get it to boot is, as I told, to use only 2GB of RAM.

Do you have any idea? I've tried to search Google but I couldn't yet find something related to what is happening to me.

Thanks in advance

miagu

Member

Registered: 2018-02-02

Posts: 2

Re: Old laptop boots only with 2GB of RAM

Uhm, it started with mem=3500M
I'm starting to think that it's related to shared video memory...