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Dell 2650, CentOS, and more than 4G of RAM

For those of you who might be running into the same problem I was with using CentOS’s PAE kernel to support more than 4G of RAM – where the system would crash during the boot process – the solution is to upgrade the firmware for the RAID controller. You can find firmware for the PERC (Dell’s rebranded Adaptec RAID controller) on Dell’s web site – it requires two floppy disks and is a self-extracting archive that will write itself to the floppies. Those of you like me who haven’t been keeping floppy drives in your computers will be happy to know that a external USB floppy drive works just fine for writing the firmware.

This entry was posted on Sunday, September 7th, 2008 at 5:08 pm and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

2 Responses to “Dell 2650, CentOS, and more than 4G of RAM”

  1. David Says:
    November 12th, 2008 at 4:19 am

    Hello. This is likely a shot in the dark, but I’m wondering if I could ask you about an account you seemed to have made on livejournal a long time ago: http://howl.livejournal.com/profile

    I’d just like to ask if you’ve abandoned it or not. I’m very sorry for bothering you, but I figured it wouldn’t hurt to ask and I wasn’t sure where else to contact you.

    Thank you for taking the time to read this! Looking forward to response.

  2. matt Says:
    February 22nd, 2009 at 4:12 pm

    Hey there, I stumbled upon your page while looking for a fix. I’ve been trying all weekend to get my 2650 to run CentOS 5.2 wiht 8Gb of Ram. Fresh installations fail on first boot. Any idea what Perc firmware you used?
    Thanks.
    Matt

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