When I did a fresh install of CentOS 6.2, I was asked to enable kdump at the default 128kb. I checked the box. I have tried it with the immediate restart and without it. Either way, on the next boot, if I escape the GUI splash screen or boot at runlevel 3, I get a [warning]
for kdump, but everything seems to work fine.
Over at LinuxQuestions.org there is a similar post, and one answer was this:
It shouldn't be a problem: you don't need to configure kdump or have
it enabled for everything else to work. If you are selecting to enable
kdump and that error is fatal (ie you can't continue) then you must
have about 128MB RAM.
http://www.linuxquestions.org/questions/red-hat-31/insufficient-memory-to-configure-kdump-878665/
Here is a very informative articel that has some explicit, sundry solutions: http://docs.redhat.com/docs/en-US/Red_Hat_Enterprise_Linux/6/html/Deployment_Guide/ch-kdump.html
Can you boot the machine in runlevel 3? And what is the "noise" you refer to? Do you get the [warning]
in the booting report. Maybe you can at the very least log in at a lower runlevel and then disable the kdump service from startup.