On Wed Feb 1, 2012, Brad Campbell wrote:

On 01/02/12 22:42, Thomas Fjellstrom wrote:

quoted

Yeah, GRUB immediately throws an "out of memory. Aborted" error, its
annoying, but I reported the issue on GRUB's bug tracker after talking
to a guy in #grub on freenode. Hopefully someone looks at it soon. It
appears it happens so early in grub's startup that it can't even output
any debug info (I was asked to run: `grub-install --debug-image=all
/dev/sdX`, and did so, I get debug output when the card is not
installed, but absolutely nothing when it is installed.

Just another data point. I've seen this issue also. It does not appear to
be GRUB's fault. It appears the BIOS on the card does something funky as
it also prevents syslinux/isolinux/pxelinux and its friends from properly
detecting/reporting the machines memory. Machine has 16GB but a PXE boot
believes it has 3GB.

I "worked around" the problem by swapping out the mainboard for a later
model with a different BIOS and the problem went away. Not pretty, but it
was the only way I could get the machine to boot with those cards in it. I
have 4 IBM cards in 2 machines and they work fine here. I still have the
dodgy mainboard and can set it up if you need help testing/reproducing the
issue.

I meant to do some testing on it tonight, but that doesn't seem like its going 
to happen. Basically I'm going to try that grub change and see if it helps, if 
you have the time, and desire to help, that would be nice, but I'm most likely 
going to try it out tomorrow sometime regardless.

Regards,
Brad

-- 
Thomas Fjellstrom
thomas@fjellstrom.ca