So I'm having a rather peculiar problem, we've been running FreeNAS on an old pc for the past year or so no problems, even with only 3GB of RAM (scary I know, but we're just poor college students) and we finally shuffled enough extra cash together to buy 8GB of pc-6400 ram. This is the maximum amount allowed by our motherboard.
When the RAM arrived I promptly shut the server down, installed the new RAM, and booted back up. The server would not boot, and I thought maybe I had bad RAM. I checked the BIOS of the computer and everything checked out fine, put the old RAM back in and it booted fine.
I then figured maybe one of the sticks of ram was bad or maybe even my usb boot drive had been corrupt. I then made a backup of my config and freshly installed FreeNAS on my usb drive. It still wouldn't boot with 8GB of RAM. I even made sure to have a memory test done at boot, everything passed.
So then I started to test booting with fewer RAM sticks. Low and behold the FreeNAS will boot with only 4GB of the new ram, but not with 8GB. I tried multiple different configurations of the RAM in the DIMM slots but it didn't matter which ones I used it would always boot with 4GB. I also tried booting FreeNAS on my laptop with the same usb stick and it initialized fine and began booting.
It doesn't make sense why the motherboard would register all 8GB of RAM fine, but FreeNAS would freeze when trying to boot. It would freeze right after it said "gcc version 4.2.1 patched" and would sit there until I shut it off again. I let it sit for a good half hour to be sure it wasn't just thinking and it still wouldn't continue through the boot process.
I'm stumped.. anyone have any other suggestions/ideas on why this would be happening? I was using 64 bit FreeNAs 9.2.1.5 both before and after the RAM installation
When the RAM arrived I promptly shut the server down, installed the new RAM, and booted back up. The server would not boot, and I thought maybe I had bad RAM. I checked the BIOS of the computer and everything checked out fine, put the old RAM back in and it booted fine.
I then figured maybe one of the sticks of ram was bad or maybe even my usb boot drive had been corrupt. I then made a backup of my config and freshly installed FreeNAS on my usb drive. It still wouldn't boot with 8GB of RAM. I even made sure to have a memory test done at boot, everything passed.
So then I started to test booting with fewer RAM sticks. Low and behold the FreeNAS will boot with only 4GB of the new ram, but not with 8GB. I tried multiple different configurations of the RAM in the DIMM slots but it didn't matter which ones I used it would always boot with 4GB. I also tried booting FreeNAS on my laptop with the same usb stick and it initialized fine and began booting.
It doesn't make sense why the motherboard would register all 8GB of RAM fine, but FreeNAS would freeze when trying to boot. It would freeze right after it said "gcc version 4.2.1 patched" and would sit there until I shut it off again. I let it sit for a good half hour to be sure it wasn't just thinking and it still wouldn't continue through the boot process.
I'm stumped.. anyone have any other suggestions/ideas on why this would be happening? I was using 64 bit FreeNAs 9.2.1.5 both before and after the RAM installation
