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9288
April 29th, 2008 00:00
PowerEdge 2900 memory upgrade flakey
:smileymad:We have two identical PE2900's used in a cold server/hot server environment with one set of disks. We later added a SCSI card and an external tape drive to the hot server. The servers came with 4GB memory in each. We decided to take advantage of the current low memory prices and upgrade them to 8GB each. We ordered Dell certified memory from the parts listed for one of our service tags. When we received it, we noticed it was a different brand than came with the systems. We tried putting 4gb of the new memory into each machine per the directions in the users manual. The system started up and everything seemed fine so we made some software changes and restarted the system. When the system started it now displayed an error message (don't recall exact wording) to the effect that the memory in the first two paired banks were not compatible and disabled them. Swapping memory between banks (swapping brand A with brand A and brand B with brand B) got the system operational again until the next restart. We finally put all the brand A memory in one machine and the brand B memory in the other. This worked fine for a week. Then we shutdown to swap the drives to the cold server. We had to move a SCSI card from the hot server to the cold server for the backup tape drive. The cold server gave us errors saying the raid battery was dead and that some of the fans weren't working. (We have a ticket open on that so won't say more about it). We had to move back to the hot server. Now it gave an error saying that the second 4GB of memory was not compaatible with the first 4GB. They all came out the same box! We pulled the second 4GB and are running with 4GB in a hot server/dead server configuration. Not what we want.
:smileymad:
jcn77056
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April 29th, 2008 17:00
Put all the new memory in one system and run either the Dell diagnostics or Memtest86 to see if the memory is good.
Did you get the memory from Dell? If so, it's covered under the system warranty. Have Dell support figure out what to do with it. If you bought it from someone else, you'll need to test how they stand behind their certified memory by calling them up and asking them what to do.
The memory is DDR2 PC2-5300 ECC, Registered, CL=5, right?
AxelLarson
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April 30th, 2008 02:00
Yes, the memory came from Dell, we were hoping to avoid compatibilty problems.
Yes, those are the specifications.
I did run Dell diagnostics once with all the new memory in one system. That was the diagnostics that run under Windows. The new version doesn't appear to run much of a test.
It's a magor hassle to run a standalone test. I'll open a ticket with Dell support and see where we go from there.