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From: cactus@zardoz.club.cc.cmu.edu (Todd Masco)
Newsgroups: comp.sys.amiga.hardware
Subject: Re: 4 meg ZIPS=3.5 megs installed?
Message-ID: <1991Jun17.153229.2960@zardoz.club.cc.cmu.edu>
Date: 17 Jun 91 15:32:29 GMT
References: <8476@oasys.dt.navy.mil>
Organization: Physics Department, Carnegie Mellon University
Lines: 32

In article <8476@oasys.dt.navy.mil> lapeyre@oasys.dt.navy.mil (J P Lapeyre) writes:
> Anyone know
> why my system doesn't show 4 megs of fast RAM? The 3.5 worth all checks
> out fine. That's my dilemma, the other 0.5 meg doesn't even show up
> so, how can I test it?

Worry not.  This is a "problem" that I found with my 3000 when I got
it, but after putting a little thought into it, it seemed clear what
was going on.

Firstly, before you put the 4 more megs in, your system should have
been showing 1 Meg Chip/ .5 Meg Fast.

Secondly, we all know that the 2.0 ROMs are not yet available -- and
they will be 512K.  When you boot up, the screen flashes that it's
loading Kickstart 2.x.  It's got to go somewhere in memory.

So, it kind of makes sense that the "missing" memory is being used for
what would normally be in the Kickstart ROM.  It's partitioned off
from the rest of your memory.

After coming to this conclusion, I asked a friend what was going on --
and I was right.  In the place of the ROMs there are some EEPROMs
telling the 3000 to load from a partition on the harddrive in the
partitioned memory.

I couldn't find any mention of this anywhere in the docs, by the way.
I didn't look *awefully* hard, but it would have been nice to see it
somewhere in bold, friendly letters.
-- 
Todd L. Masco - CMU Physics   | "Free speech is the right to shout
cactus@zardoz.club.cc.cmu.edu |   'theatre' in a crowded fire."