Hello to everyone here in the RedHat forum, I'm having some difficulty with an Intel Server I'm trying to install RH ES 3 u3 onto, perhaps you can help.

The mobo is a 7520JR2 (Dual xeon with 1x3.2Ghz installed, Sata RAID with 2x400Gb disks, 4x1Gb DDR2 ECC) which is very nice indeed...

...but, with half the ram slots filled with 4Gb RAM the RedHat install hangs when installing packages or formatting a partition. After much messing around with RAID configurations and drivers and swap partitions I finally whipped a few Gig RAM out leaving 2Gb. And it installed perfectly...the RAM isnt bad 'cos if I swap the sticks out the install still works, just not with the full 4Gb in. The older version of this board used DDR ECC and there have been no issues installing ES (64bit btw) onto these older boards with 4Gb RAM.

For now, I have installed RH and then added the extra 2Gb which seems ok, but where should I check to ensure this is being utilised? I will repeat the install today and post back if anything comes to light, but until then, does anyone know why the install hangs with 4Gb?

Thanks

Probably you kernel does not have high memory support enabled for ram over 4 gig. You may need to recompile your kernel so that it handles memory over 4 gig or install an alternative kernel with those features if its available.

Well I've run through the install twice already today and both times have been completely succesful with the full 4gig installed?!

I'm wondering if subtle differences in the partition setup has been causing the freezes, although I dont recall any great variation between today and all those failed installs.

Although one small problem remains - If I specify a seperate /var partition, I find RH fails to unmount it before shutdown because the device is busy, no problems unmounting any fs if leave /var in with root, any thoughts?

The installation program is seperate from the kernel that you will be running, so even though you have had a successful install if your kernel does not support memory over 4 gig you will keep having problems regardless of how many times you reinstall (You need to avoid reinstalling because this is not Windoze where most problems are resolved by reinstalling ). Like I said earlier your only option is to get the right kernel or recompile the kernel and enable large memory support for systems with ram over 4 gig.

Thanks for your input red (minus the implication that Im harbouring some kind of windows mentality ), but I'm not really conveying my point accurately here sry. The machine is a testbed, a prototype if you will, which I need to know RH ES 3 will install consistently onto. I believe that configuring my swap partitions differently has helped me create a template for future installations which works. Thanks again, RHC.