# PAE Windows 2003 Enterprise



## tech-it-^ (Aug 18, 2006)

Hey,

I'm having a little trouble with getting one of our servers to recognize the full amount of RAM on the system. We have 8 Gigs installed and it only shows up on the 32 bit Windows 2003 Enterprise as 3.5 Gigs.

Now I know that by useing the PAE for the 32 bit Server 2003 Enterprise you can have up to 32 GB of RAM. I searched good old google, and I seen that to enable PAE you must edit the Boot.ini file. by adding the /PAE switch to the end of the ARC path. This is what I come up with:

[boot loader]
timeout=30
default=multi(0)disk(0)rdisk(0)partition(2)\WINDOWS
[operating systems]
multi(0)disk(0)rdisk(0)partition(2)\WINDOWS="Windows Server 2003, Enterprise" /fastdetect /PAE

This is what I read on the MSDN, on technet and everything. When I tried to reboot... well... it didn't want to come back up and Windows Server 2003 Enterprise decided to crash. I had to reboot into safe mode and take out the /PAE switch from the ARC path. 

I then seen that if the DEP was enabled, then automatically the PAE would be enabled by default. So... I tried to enable the DEP by going to the Right click my computer > Properties > Advanced > Performance Options Settings. But lone be hold... there was not a DEP tab there. So... I'm kind of stuck. I doubled check and the hardware should be compatible with doing this. 

We have a Dell PowerEdge 2950 with the standard system specs. I'm about to loose my mind over this. I've installed 64 bit version and of course... works just fine. Even the DEP tab is there, but... not in the 32 bit, and there both Dell 2950's. Anyway, help would be greatly appreciated. If you could that would be great. I hope to hear from someone soon. Thank you.


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## tech-it-^ (Aug 18, 2006)

bump*


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## tech-it-^ (Aug 18, 2006)

bump*


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## tech-it-^ (Aug 18, 2006)

bump*


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## tech-it-^ (Aug 18, 2006)

bump*


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## tech-it-^ (Aug 18, 2006)

ha, figured it out. I read somewhere that there was some sort of hot fix for it with SP1. I was trying to do it from just the basic build with no updates. The service packs fixed it and now it is seeing all 8 GB of memory.


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## XtabbedoutX (Sep 12, 2007)

Sorry no one was able to help you on this. Glad you got the problem resolved. From my experience if something in a M$ environment is not acting like it should out of the box a Fix or service pack will usually fix what they forgot. This reasoning especially applies to OS's that have been out for some time.


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## tech-it-^ (Aug 18, 2006)

lol, thank you very much.


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