Can't add more than 4 GB RAM to VM on ESX 3.0

[stanmorsky]

Hi,

I increase it to 5 GB on the VM and reboot. It sees the additional memory, but loses the network card after the reboot. I have

tried this on two VMs on different ESX servers and both had the same behavior. After I set it to 4 GB and reboot everything works

fine.

Any ideas?

Thanks!

[AWo]

What guest OS do you use (32 bit / 64 bit)?

AWo

[stanmorsky]

Sorry forgot to add that. Windows 2003 Enterprise, 32 bit. I added the /PAE switch in the boot.ini file.

[AWo]

SP2 or R2?

AWo

[wila]

Did you set the OS Type properly to Windows 2003 enterprise? Only enterprise edition is capable of addressing over 4GB IIRC and just setting it to 2003 server would likely limit the address space available.

--

Wil

[stanmorsky]

One is:

Windows 2003 R2

Enterprise

SP2

Other is:

Windows 2003

Enterprise

SP2

Thanks!!

[stanmorsky]

Yes both are set to Enterprise.

Thanks.

[RParker]

You moved from standard addressing to PAE, and I believe if you run repair on the installation (with 5G RAM) then it will work fine.

But when you run the repair, skip past the first screen and pretend you are installing a NEW OS. Once it gets to the point where it identifies the harddrive and destination partition it should give you option to delete previous OS or repair. That's where you press 'R' to repair the existing OS. It will take the same time as a new install, but that should fix the problem.

[stanmorsky]

Thank you! I will try this.

[jhanekom]

Have you installed VMware Tools? If you haven't the system will still be using the AMD PCnet driver, in stead of the vmxnet driver.

PAE affects the way PCI devices are addressed by drivers. It is possible that the AMD PCnet device/driver doesn't cope with this. (At least, this is apparently the case for many distro's in the Linux world.)

[stanmorsky]

I had not. Thank you!!!

[stanmorsky]

I had not. Thank you!!

[stanmorsky]

I had not. Thank you!!

[stanmorsky]

I had not. Thank you!!

[stanmorsky]

I had not. Thank you!!