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October 19th, 2010 07:00
BIOS options for disabling 32-bit compatibility mode?
Does anyone know if there are any options in the Dell BIOS (PowerEdge R610) for disabling the 32-bit compatibility mode?
Background: A PCI device in my system requires a large memory (>2GB) and BIOS fails to output anything to the screen in this mode. I'm not sure why the BIOS is hung as there is not serial port output either. I'm speculating that the BIOS is unable to fit this 2GB PCI window below the 4GB limit and is hung. I'm assuming that if there is anyway to tell BIOS not to worry about being compatible with a 32-bit OS, then it will be able to allocate the requested large PCI memory. Any suggestions?
thanks,
-SP
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Dev Mgr
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October 19th, 2010 11:00
I'm not sure if this solves your problem, and there are several downsides (if you don't have a modern OS), but you could go into the bios and change the bios to UEFI.
This choice is only compatible with x64 OSes, but as it forces your bootdisk to use a GPT partition table, it will require a whole OS reinstall and there are some minimum requirements; if you're using a Microsoft OS, you need at least 2008 x64, and if you're using a Red Hat Linux solution, it has to be based on 6.x (beta only last I checked).
These OS requirements are because the kernel needs to support using a GPT disk for the bootdisk (not the case with Windows 2003 x64 or Red Hat 5.5 and earlier).
spbbp
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October 19th, 2010 12:00
Does Dell BIOS support 64-bit bars so the PCI address space is placed above 4GB limit?