memory goes missing after boot

[wolfgangsz]

I am running debian etch on an Asustek M2V AM2 motherboard with an Athlon 64 X2 4200+ processor and 2GB of RAM installed.
When I boot the box, I can see that GRUB recognizes all of the 2GB and I can confirm that with the "displaymem" command at the GRUB prompt. Then I boot into debian proper and all I get is 885MB. However, Knoppix 5.0 boots nicely off the CD and sees all of the RAM.

Is there anybody out there who can help? Do I need to set special boot parameters? Do I need a different kernel (I am running the 32bit version, aka normal x86).
Any pointers appreciated.

regards
Wolfgang

[daark.child]

You probably need to install a kernel built for machines with more than 1 gig of ram. The first place to check is the Debian repos because they seem to have lots of kernels available.

[wolfgangsz]

I thought that any standard kernel would support up to 4 GB of RAM and one only needed a special kernel (one of the bigmem types) if one wanted to run more than that?

[daark.child]

I am not sure about Debian, but on some mainstream distros the default kernel could not handle more than 1 gig of ram. This is now changing and most default kernels are compiled with high memory support. This article may shed more light on the high memory issue in Debian.

[wolfgangsz]

Thanks for that. I have now downloaded the relevant 686 kernel and guess what, it works. That was gold.