Not Enough Memory or Kernel Panic: You choose

[haxin]

I have a couple of Compaq Proliant servers at home that I received from work. I installed OpenBSD a while ago and it worked beautifully except for the fact that it doesn't have SMP support :). SO I let the machine sit for a while and just let it go. I recently got my hands on a copy of RH9 so I decided to install it on both of my machines>
(For clarification: The "dual" machine is a dual pentium pro 200 with 512k cache each chip and has 256MB of ram. The "quad" machine is a quad pentium pro 200 with 512k cache each ship and has 384MB of ram.)

I popped the CD in and the syetem booted fine (off of the CD) without a problem at the boot: prompt I hit enter which brought me to a nice screen that said that I didn't have enough memory. Clearly this was a mistake.
(for now we'll talk about the quad system)
I went ahead and entered "linux mem=393216K" and watched as it booted up. Everything went along just fine until it reported a Kernel panic:
EXT2-fs: unable to read superblock
cramfs: wrong magic
FAT: unable to read boot sector
isofs_read_super: bread failed, dev=09:02, iso_blknum=16, block=32
Kernel panic: VFS: Unable to mount root fs on 09:02

At this point the system is frozen with the caps and scroll lock lights blinking. (percussive mantenance on the keyboard results in various keyboard: unknown scancode or sequence errors) After rebooting I tried entering "linux mem=384M" and I achieved the same results. Mind you the machine works fine with OpenBSD. At this point I'm rather stumped - I tried using "linux expert" however that returns me to the not enough memory error - "linux expert mem=XXXM" results in a kernel panic.

I don't know the model number (both systems are identical) however I am PRETTY sure it's 5000 and I don't know what series it is. I did quite a bit of searching and spent a lot of time on http://www.cpqlinux.com/ reading the documentation but it doesn't necessarily apply to my situation.

Any information would greatly be appreciated.

[Dave Weis]

I have some of the same machines running fine. I had to use this workaround:
here.

My lilo.conf file for a 5500 with 768 megs of ram says:
image=/boot/vmlinuz-2.4.7
append=" mem=exactmap mem=640K@0 mem=767M@1M"
label=linux247
read-only
root=/dev/ida/c0d0p2

dave