ram issue

[Danny891]

I am running windows 7 and I have 4gb of ram but it only recognizes 3gb but when I go to use virtualbox and it asks me how much ram i want to allocate (im trying to use OS X by the way) it still only recognizes the 3gb. Is there a way I can use the 4th gb with virtualbox? Thanks

[stefan.becker]

How much RAM has the host?

Win 32 or 64 Bit?

[mpack]

If your host has 4GB of RAM then no, there is no way you can allocate all of it to a VM. You should check how much RAM your host has available when running, and ideally should allocate no more than around 50% of that to a VM, and if you did that then you'd only run one VM at a time.

[Danny891]

its 32bit sorry should have said that. what im trying to do is like have 2gb for windows 7 and 2 gig for os x instead of having to only 3gb between them.

[BillG]

No. VirtualBox is an application which runs under the host OS. It can only see the memory which the host OS can see. The only solution would be to run a 64-bit OS on the host.

[Perryg]

Start your Mac host in 64-bit mode.
6+4 while booting.

[mpack]

its 32bit sorry should have said that. what im trying to do is like have 2gb for windows 7 and 2 gig for os x instead of having to only 3gb between them.

It's hard for me to give numbers without knowing how much host RAM is still available (not how much it started with). In theory you can give the guest almost all available memory, but in practice you would want to be well shy of that.

Why you do particularly want to have your host memory allocated at once? You goal should be to give the VM no more RAM than it needs. I would start by giving the guest 1GB and see how it goes from there. I assume the guest is 32bits also.