So I decided to do an upgrade on my desktop machine to give it some more power, and cycle down the old system to replace my server as it could really use an upgrade. Did some searching and decided to go with a Intel Core Duo 2 2.4ghz on an Asus P5B board with 4 gigs of ram. Got it all home this evening and started tearing apart my system and installing all the new shinny computer parts. Got it all together without much problem and then started on getting my desktop back up and going. This is where things started getting tricky.

First, the bios was only showing 3 gigs of ram no matter what I tried. After doing a bios upgrade (which you can do on flash memory stick these days), I found a site mentioning a bios setting that you need to change to make it show 4 gigs. (BIOS -> Advanced -> Chipset -> North Bridge Configuration -> Memory Remap Feature).

So after finally getting that sorted out I decided to do a fresh install of debian on a new hard drive I got for the machine. Went through and finished the install, but then realized I only had 2 gigs of ram available. Thinking it was a kernel option I had seen before I recompiled the kernel with 4 gig memory support but no change. Then after doing some googling found out that you need to be running the AMD64 port to be able to access that much memory.

So, I then downloaded the AMD64 installer (which is kind of a strange name since it seems to cover all x86_64 chips). I then ran into a problem with the installer and this particular board it seems and for the installer to not hang you need to run it with the option agp=off so that it doesn't attempt to load the intel_agp driver which seems to cause problems.

But now it seems the system is finally up and going. And this is the first 64bit system I've actually installed as well so that should be interesting...

posted at: 02:55 | path: /debian | permanent link to this entry