Question : Problem: DL360 G5 not reporting full amount of physical RAM

Hi,

I have a DL360 G5 server that has 4gb of physical RAM installed (4 dimms of 1024 DDR2 667mhz FB-DIMM ECC), PAE is not enabled,

for some reason the OS (server 2003 Standard) reports that there is only 3.25gb available.


I did some research and found the certain Intel Chipset give away up to 512mb to PCI express to improve I/O.

Also, I went through the boot.ini and saw that there is a /3gb switch, The /3GB switch allocates 3 GB of virtual address space to an application that uses IMAGE_FILE_LARGE_ADDRESS_AWARE in the process header. This switch allows applications to address 1 GB of additional virtual address space above 2 GB.

The virtual address space of processes and applications is still limited to 2 GB, unless the /3GB switch is used in the Boot.ini file. The following example shows how to add the /3GB parameter in the Boot.ini file to enable application memory tuning:


The server rom is P58 dated 11/08/2006, several HP posts say that a BIOS update can fix this situation.


Can anyone offer any advice / second opinion please?

Answer : Problem: DL360 G5 not reporting full amount of physical RAM

ComputerMDnow

I notice that nobody has suggested the /PAE switch, have you tried that yet?  Even if you MB eats half a gig of memory for the PCI-e slots, then you should still have 3.5 GB.

Check out this article

http://technet2.microsoft.com/windowsserver/en/library/7706caae-8fc9-45b2-9d8d-7b5a6b7256491033.mspx?mfr=true

The /PAE extension allows you to address over the 4GB limit, enable it and see if you get any of your memory back.  Its a standard practice in large IT environments, we use it to address large amounts of ram for SQL, etc.

Danno