Amount of Memory Detected by POST and NTDETECT.COM Differs

This article was previously published under Q127158

NTDETECT.COM detects slightly less memory than the power on self-test (POST) does.

This is by design. Before NTDETECT.COM loads, some of the memory is used by the initialization of the Hardware Abstraction Layer (HAL). The difference in memory detected by POST and NTDETECT.COM varies from platform to platform (Intel, MIPS, Alpha and Power PC).