I have 1.5 GB of RAM installed on an older Dell, Pentium 4. I just installed Ubuntu 9.1 and the system is only seeing 244 MB of RAM, even though there is 1.5 GB on the system. The BIOS sees all of it. I ran a Knoppix disc and it only saw 25 MB upon booting.

I made no particular changes to the installation taht would affect this. I looked through the BIOS and the only setting I could see was the AGP aperture. Not even sure what this is.

Anyone know where I went wrong?

I also tried moving the memory modules around on the board. Booted with the 1 GB stick, still saw 244 MB.

NOTE - This same system, except for the hard drive, had Windows XP running on it. The user who ran it said that the RAM was good and always showed 1.5 GB.

Here is sudo cat /proc/meminfo

MemTotal: 250064 kB
MemFree: 3832 kB
Buffers: 13356 kB
Cached: 52216 kB
SwapCached: 19676 kB
Active: 91504 kB
Inactive: 113884 kB
Active(anon): 60572 kB
Inactive(anon): 82156 kB
Active(file): 30932 kB
Inactive(file): 31728 kB
Unevictable: 0 kB
Mlocked: 0 kB
HighTotal: 0 kB
HighFree: 0 kB
LowTotal: 250064 kB
LowFree: 3832 kB
SwapTotal: 4883720 kB
SwapFree: 4781204 kB
Dirty: 496 kB
Writeback: 720 kB
AnonPages: 123796 kB
Mapped: 23368 kB
Slab: 17248 kB
SReclaimable: 7932 kB
SUnreclaim: 9316 kB
PageTables: 5304 kB
NFS_Unstable: 0 kB
Bounce: 0 kB
WritebackTmp: 0 kB
CommitLimit: 5008752 kB
Committed_AS: 740372 kB
VmallocTotal: 770600 kB
VmallocUsed: 26008 kB
VmallocChunk: 662544 kB
HugePages_Total: 0
HugePages_Free: 0
HugePages_Rsvd: 0
HugePages_Surp: 0
Hugepagesize: 4096 kB
DirectMap4k: 114128 kB
DirectMap4M: 147456 kB