For some time i have been pondering if i should tamper the ridiculous windows 3GB ram limit on XP Pro. While i have 4GB in my computer and would like to use all of that, especially if windows is solely used for games. I thought it would be only logical and reasonable to be able to use as much ram as i can get. Thus 3GB was not enough.
According to this document from our infidels at microsoft i should be able to remove or reset or whatever the 3GB memory cap and use the extra 1GB by adding 4 bits to the 32-bit hardware layer or something. i didn’t really read it to be honest. Just glanced over it.
Anyway, on this page and on many forums with people having similar issues and in need of more ram i read that when you edit the boot.ini file to add some “switch” to it it would enable the 4GB ram. Which is the limit on Windows XP for some reason i didn’t read. I guess it has something to do with the system being 32-bit since we’re adding bits to get more ram…
Anyway, it turned out another epic fail for windows as if of course didn’t work. The OS needed a reboot to apply the boot.ini changes and BAM!! Some nasty error during boot time kindly informing me my hal.dll was damaged and i should re-install that one file to fix it. Fine. Then let me boot to a command prompt or anything, ANYTHING to fix it. But windows had no love and no way of booting up properly. Which left me frustrated trying to boot a windows 98SE boot cd i had made. Of course, using bootcamp prevented me from doing anything useful with it. So that didn’t work. Then Ubuntu 7.04. But that would not boot either. Then it hit me like a mac pro falling from 3 stories. Enable NTFS support through OSX. It was so obvious…. *sigh*
And of course while nothing else would work OSX came to the rescue. I had to install MacFuse 1.5 and NTFS-3G and after a reboot i could read/write on the windows partition. I quickly edited the boot.ini again and voila. Windows worked. I guess the error telling me the hal.dll wasn’t so accurate at all. But what do you expect from windows…
