4GB of ram random crashes/freezes/kernel panics..

[TheTinRam]

This thread has been tremendously helpful and I wanted to thank everybody here. I was getting KPs in specific places. For example, when I tried to install Windows XP in Parallels or when I tried to install Adobe Master Collection.

 

My specs:

Asus P5B Deluxe WiFi with 4GB of OCZ memory

Saphire X1300 PCIe

4 SATA HDs

LITE-ON SATA burner

1 IDE HD

 

I disabled memory mapping. The BIOS now sees 3GB of RAM. I no longer get KPs though. I find it fascinating that the OS reports 4GB of memory even in the monitor it appears to only see 3GB.

I am going to run in this mode until I can get rid of the last IDE device I have. Then will disable IDE and re-enable memory mapping. I want to make sure I get the full use of the 4GB.

Again thanks a lot!

[firstcolle]

i decide to remove my hd IDE from leopard and use it for win XP recovery startup.. in this way i can disable the j micron and enable it only when i need to start win xp....

 

Now my leo is stable with 4gb ram 800mhz and memory remab enabled....

now start to overclock!!!

[tukster]

This thread has been tremendously helpful and I wanted to thank everybody here. I was getting KPs in specific places. For example, when I tried to install Windows XP in Parallels or when I tried to install Adobe Master Collection.

 

sigh

with memory remap disabled i cannot install the adobe cs3. it moans something about javascript errors and then quits the installer.

with remap enabled i get kernel panics during installation. (aaargh)

 

will try removing the only ide i have and then disable jmicron controler with remap enabled and post results here

 

SUCCESS GUYS

 

managed to install cs3 without KP!!!

this post was of great help, THANK YOU ALL!

with memory map disabled and jmicron disabled CS3 installed without KPs.

javascript errors were an unrelated problem caused by failed attempts to install cs3.

solved with uninstall script from adobe.

 

Btw, photoshop reports only 3gb od ram now. i have 4gigs but after disabling remap pohotoshop can access only 3.

[QuietOC]

Btw, photoshop reports only 3gb od ram now. i have 4gigs but after disabling remap pohotoshop can access only 3.

All OSX versions of Photoshop are 32-bit only.

 

When you run Photoshop CS3 on a 64-bit operating system, such as Mac OS X v10.4 and later, Photoshop can access up to 8 GB of RAM. You can see the actual amount of RAM Photoshop can use in the Let Photoshop Use number when you set the Let Photoshop Use slider in the Performance preference to 100%. The RAM above the 100% used by Photoshop, which is from approximately 3 GB to 3.7 GB, can be used directly by Photoshop plug-ins (some plug-ins need large chunks of contiguous RAM), filters, and actions. If you have more than 4 GB (to 8 GB), the RAM above 4 GB is used by the operating system as a cache for the Photoshop scratch disk data. Data that previously was written directly to the hard disk by Photoshop is now cached in this high RAM before being written to the hard disk by the operating system. If you are working with files large enough to take advantage of these extra 2 GB of RAM, the RAM cache can increase performance of Photoshop.

Photoshop can only "see" 4GB--of that it can only use 3GB directly.

[dinner_plate]

I have overcome my kernel panics with the following system;

 

GA-G33M-S2 (not the DS2R model, which would have been a smarter buy)

Intel E8400 3.0GHz 45nm

2x2GB 800MHz DDR2

 

2x500GB WD SATA HD

nVidia 8600GT 256MB

 

I am running 10.5.2 with a Retail DVD install and using the EFI boot.plist string, replacement 9.2 (sleep/shotdown fix) kernel and have deleted the Jmicron .kext and started using AHCI mode.

 

Which means I only have 2xSATA ports available. No DVD drive at the moment, so I am going to get a PCI-E SATA adapter using the SiI 3132 chip to get my SATA DVD drive back (and a spare SATA port.)

[QuietOC]

I am running 10.5.2 with a Retail DVD install and using the EFI boot.plist string, replacement 9.2 (sleep/shotdown fix) kernel and have deleted the Jmicron .kext and started using AHCI mode.

 

Which means I only have 2xSATA ports available. No DVD drive at the moment, so I am going to get a PCI-E SATA adapter using the SiI 3132 chip to get my SATA DVD drive back (and a spare SATA port.)

Did you try setting your SATA drives to IDE mode and using DuNe's IOATAFamily.kext to enable all four SATA ports?

[Pandar]

Here's a great source for pci express sata II cards with 3132 chipset.

 

http://www.monoprice.com/products/search.a...p;x=30&y=13

 

they are flashable from raid to non raid or back

 

Pandar

[hackeron]

you could resolve the panics by simply deleteing AppleVIAATA.kext and JMicronATA.kext, but you would lose all IDE devices. If this doesn't matter, then do it. That will fully fix your problem.

 

I removed the 2 kext files and now I get "Still waiting for root device" when I try to boot into Leopard and it just hangs there repeating "Still waiting for root device" every few minutes.What do I do now...

 

EDIT: I restored the 2 kexts from the 10.1 install CD and it seems to be OK again - I have tried the other tips in this thread like disabling memory map and the PATA controller in the bios - will report if there are any further kernel panics.

 

EDIT 2: Have been running transmission, handbrake and IO benchmarks for an hour (which would normally cause a kernel panic several times over) and so far no problems - hopefully it will stay that way

[peach-os]

Here's a great source for pci express sata II cards with 3132 chipset.

 

http://www.monoprice.com/products/search.a...p;x=30&y=13

 

they are flashable from raid to non raid or back

 

Pandar

 

I´ve excluded everything following many advices here. after a very good tip from polobear I must say: the sil3132 32 bit drivers are an other reason for panics with 4GB! I still didn´t enable the remap feature because I prefer booting from raid0.

[Pandar]

???

 

I've been running 4 gb ram for 2 days, and pushing the limits by running lots of stuff at once. No kernel panics yet! I'm hoping that you are wrong. I don't understand what you're talking about with memory remap. What I did was to disable Jmicron support in the bios, and delete the Jmicron.kext file.

 

Pandar

[KirbySaysHi]

Sorry I haven't been around lately in this thread.

 

To clarify:

 

ALL of my ICH9R sata ports are working. I don't remember exactly how many that is, but I think it's six... The only sata ports that are non-functional are the two purple ones controlled by the JMicron. They are non-functional because I disabled the entire JMicron controller. I have a lot of hard drives, and that is why I needed to buy the rosewill sata pci card.

 

I've been running for more than a week now, and not a single kernel panic!

 

The memory remap feature that y'all are talking about is not available on my motherboard. Also, I don't know if I would want it, since it seems to limit your max ram... why not just do this with maxmem at darwin boot?

 

I also have my sata ports set to ide mode and NOT AHCI mode, due to an updated kext that I mentioned earlier in this thread.

 

I'll actually answer pms now, so if anyone has any questions, send them along!

[frizbot]

Maxmem is the same as disabling Memory Remap, except remap is in BIOS (effects Windows), and might give you 3.2gb instead of maxmem's 2gb I've seen earlier in the thread. Deleting jmicron.kext causes KPs for some people, so disabling in BIOS seems ideal. One loses IDE, but that's unavoidable right now without other hardware controllers.

 

Which motherboard is the best for having 4GB of RAM? IOW, which motherboards let you disable JMicron in BIOS? Asus P5k-E WiFi AP, ABIT IP-35 (or IX-38), or a gigabyte one? Thanks, I'm looking at buying two different yet compatible ones.

[QuietOC]

Which motherboard is the best for having 4GB of RAM? IOW, which motherboards let you disable JMicron in BIOS? Asus P5k-E WiFi AP, ABIT IP-35 (or IX-38), or a gigabyte one?

Abit has the option to disable JMicron in BIOS. I have 8GB and all 4 ICH9 SATA ports working in Tiger and Leopard. Running Memtest is an easy way to test for kernel panics.

[cebep]

jmicron on

4gb 800 ram

ahci off

 

all ok

 

тьфу*3

[peach-os]

???

 

I've been running 4 gb ram for 2 days, and pushing the limits by running lots of stuff at once. No kernel panics yet! I'm hoping that you are wrong. I don't understand what you're talking about with memory remap. What I did was to disable Jmicron support in the bios, and delete the Jmicron.kext file.

 

Pandar

 

tried everything - also disabling jmicron. result:

 

without sil3132 no kp

as soon I use the raid with the sil3132 I have to disable remap :-(

using tiger I never had this problem.

we have different mainboards, so maybe you´re the lucky one

[Marcng]

hi everyone here.

even though this is the first time i'm posting in this thread, i have been following it for quite some time.

i can confirm that disabling memory remap works for me. here is my spec:

 

Q6600

P5K-P

4 x 1GB Crucial ram

7900GTX 512MB

2 x 250GB Seagate SATAII

1 x Asus DVD rom SATAII

 

so you see i don't have any IDE hardware so after reading about the Jmicron thing, i was happy to try running 4GB without it.

i tried disabling the Jmicron controller in BIOS, deleting the .kext and both, all didn't work. still had KP when editing high-res images in photoshop CS3. then i simply disabled the memory remap thing (i left the Jmicron disabled, i didn't see it being used anyways), been KP-free for 2 weeks, 24/7.

 

but then here's another problem.

i remember reading somewhere that this KP thing only affects hackintosh with 4GB of memory. so i went out and bought 4 x 2GB hoping that it would work.

it worked, OSX booted and recognizes 8GB of memory. but KP again when using photoshop and memtesting. took one stick out, same thing. only two sticks installed then it's fine (fine as in running memtest and photo-editing at the same time).

why is it? i have tried with memory remap dis/en/abled.....

 

it's really frustrating.

anyone encountered this problem?

 

PS i'm running kalyway 10.5.1

[QuietOC]

so you see i don't have any IDE hardware so after reading about the Jmicron thing, i was happy to try running 4GB without it.

i tried disabling the Jmicron controller in BIOS, deleting the .kext and both, all didn't work. still had KP when editing high-res images in photoshop CS3. then i simply disabled the memory remap thing (i left the Jmicron disabled, i didn't see it being used anyways), been KP-free for 2 weeks, 24/7.

The JMicron is not the only kext with the problem. You have to weed out all the problem (non PAE) kexts. I don't think we have a list yet, but the VIAATA and IOATAFamily both seem to also have the problem. The kext used by CoreDuo Temp might also be a problem.

[Pandar]

tried everything - also disabling jmicron. result:

 

without sil3132 no kp

as soon I use the raid with the sil3132 I have to disable remap :-(

using tiger I never had this problem.

we have different mainboards, so maybe you´re the lucky one

 

 

hmmm... ok, one thing that's slightly different. I also have a sil3132 card, but I'm not running mine in RAID mode. I flashed the firmware using the file b7223. You might try that.

 

For the record, in the BIOS for the ga-ep35-ds3p, Jmicron is disabled by choosing "onboard sata/ide device" and setting it to disabled

 

Pandar

[Lolrus]

I just thought I'd add my experience here. Was getting random KP's (installing CS3, burning DVDs etc). I have a DS3R and disabled the onboard IDE and everything seems good so far now.

 

Also, I've got the ICH9 SATA set to AHCI mode with 4GB RAM and no issues.

[KirbySaysHi]

To everybody considering or who have bought the SI expansion card:

 

You don't need to flash the bios on the card. It's fine the way it is. I cannot confirm this for RAID, but for non-raid setups, just set the jumper on the card to the non-raid one and call it a day.

 

That is all.

[nuke61]

Which motherboard is the best for having 4GB of RAM? IOW, which motherboards let you disable JMicron in BIOS? Asus P5k-E WiFi AP, ABIT IP-35 (or IX-38), or a gigabyte one? Thanks, I'm looking at buying two different yet compatible ones.

I don't know if it's the best, but my ASUS P5W lets me disable JMicron in the BIOS. I was getting random crashes with 4GB, memory remap, and JMicron enabled. I didn't know about this thread and was pulling my hair out trying different combinations of ram timing, voltages, etc., all without helping the problem.

 

Then I stumbled upon this thread, disabled JMicron in the BIOS (losing my 500 GB video drive in the process) and the machine was rock solid for 24 hours, which is about 12 hours longer than the previous best uptime. Now I have disabled memory remap and turned JMicron back on to see if just turning off memory remap will work. Leopard sees all 4 gigs of ram, even though only 3 shows up at boot. What's even nicer is that boot time after turning OFF memory remap has dropped in half -- about 20 seconds after the Darwin boot screen and I'm at login. It was close to 1 minute with memory remap enabled.

[PooprScooper]

The Solution to this bug can be solved 2 ways,(the latter is ideal if you have all SATA)

 

1) Delete Jmicron.kext from /system/library/extensions

Delete AppleVIAATA.kext from /system/library/extensions/ and add AppleIntelPIIXATA (http://forum.insanelymac.com/index.php?showtopic=88335 ) to /system/library/extensions

Disable Jmicron in your BIOS

Reboot with -f flag before OSX boots up, (hold down f8 key if you don't get a countdown prompt)

(This does not work perfectly since other kexts have the > 4gig issue. You will still have freezes depending on the software you use.

 

2) Enable AHCI in BIOS under SATA settings if you have ALL SATA devices(HDD,DVD)

This option works the best if you aren't using any IDE devices.

(This works perfectly, but causes very big delays upon first accessing the drive and upon waking HDDS from sleep.)

[nuke61]

Update: A day later, purposely trying to crash the machine, and it's still running. I transferred about 100 gigs of files from an external Firewire/USB drive (in USB mode) to my internal ATA drive on the JMicron controller. While I was doing this I also had the iTunes add the 20 gigs of MP3's I have to its library list, while playing every song on the list. I also had Transmission uploading files, and Firefox running with 5 tabs open. Obviously not all of those things was happening the entire time, since the file transfer finished at some point and all the songs played at some point, but it was a fairly heavy in disk I/O.

 

I have:

4 GB of 667 MHz 4-4-4-12 timed ram

P5W DH motherboard

2.2 GHz Core Duo

1 SATA drive on internal connector and 1 ATA on JMicron

512 MB NVidia board with NVInject

 

In the BIOS I have Memory Remap for 64 bit OS turned OFF. So far, about 24 hours later, no crashes. With memory remap turned On, it used to crash 1 to several times a day.

[nuke61]

Update 2: 10.5.2 doesn't crash if I either keep it on continuously, or if I shutdown when not in use and restart as needed. But... it gives a kernel panic within minutes of coming out of sleep mode. I just bit the bullet and bought a 500 gig SATA drive to replace the PATA drive. JMicron is still turned on in the BIOS, but there are no PATA devices connected to it. I've had several days of uptime, waking from sleep, heavy usage, etc. and zero panics.

[Special-K]

So I was skimming through the thread, cause there's no way I'm reading 5 pages about Hack problems, and I have this same issue, odd thing is, I have an actual Mac. My MacBook came with 1GB, ran solid. No crashes, freezes, panics, nothing. I bought 4GB off macsales. Paired just so I didn't have any issues. Ever since I installed it, I've gotten panics, freezes, unexpected quits (namely in Safari). Anybody know the problem or have an idea for how to fix it?