Total amount of physical memory is incorrect after you hot-add memory by using the /3GB switch in the Boot.ini file

When you hot-add memory to a server that fully supports hot-add memory functionality, you may experience the following symptoms:

• Although the memory module is listed in Device Manager as installed, the additional memory is not available to Windows.
• The following PNPMEM warning appears in the System Event Viewer:

  Event ID: 0
  Event Type: Warning
  Event Source: PNPMEM
  Description: Failed to add memory range starting at 0x40000000 for 0x40000000 bytes. This operation exceeded the maximum memory capacity of the operating system or the server is not configured to support dynamic memory operations.

Note The memory range address that is listed in the description of the event may vary depending on the configuration of the system.

This behavior occurs only if the /3GB switch is enabled in the Boot.ini file.

If the /3GB switch is not present, hot-add memory (for example, RAM) is correctly added to the total physical memory pool that is available to Windows.

To work around this problem, you must restart the server so that the newly added memory is added to the total memory that is available to Windows.

Microsoft has confirmed that this is a problem in the Microsoft products that are listed in the "Applies to" section. This bug was corrected in Microsoft Windows 2003 Service Pack 1.

To resolve this problem, obtain the latest service pack for Microsoft Windows Server 2003. For more information, click the following article number to view the article in the Microsoft Knowledge Base: For more information about hot-add memory support in Windows Server 2003, visit the following Microsoft Web site: