From Bugzilla Helper: User-Agent: Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 6.0; Windows NT 5.1; .NET CLR 1.0.3705; .NET CLR 1.1.4322) Description of problem: Installation crashes during installation of RHES 3.0 on Compaq 2500 when passing the mem=xxxM (e.g. boot: linux mem=351M noprobe ) This results in a kernel panic where the kernel can't find the VFS: Cannot open root device "" or 48:03 The mem= statement is needed on this machine because the kernel only sees 16M instead of the 352M installed, and RHES wont install on 16 megs unlike RHES 2.1 did and let me fix it later in the grub.conf file. Error messgage when kernel panics complains about appending the correct root "" Version-Release number of selected component (if applicable): RHES 3.0 How reproducible: Always Steps to Reproduce: 1. boot cdrom or floopy disk with mem=xxxM ( with or without noprobe, expert, ramdisk_size=xxxx) 2. 3. Actual Results: Kernel panics complaining about not being able to find VFS: Cannot open root device "" or 48:03 Please append a correct "root=" boot option Kernel panic: VFS: Unable to mount root fs on 48:03 Additional info: System is Compaq 2500 w/ (2) overdrive 333mhz cpu's with 352megs ram. System has a Compaq Smart 2/P Array Controller.
have finally solved issue by creating fresh boot disk and editing syslinux.cfg, which I have done may times before but the syntax was very picky created a label label custom kernel vmlinuz append " initrd=initrd.img mem=exactmap mem=640K@0 mem=351M@1M" notice the extra space after the quote in the append line also the mem= statements would NOT work when using the hex equivalent "mem=exactmap mem=0x9f000@0 mem=0x15f00000@0x100000"
Compaq 2500 is not descriptive. Please include the full model, such as, "Compaq ProLiant 2500." One other question, did you try booting w/ unmodified boot media using the command line parameters you list as working? e.g. boot: linux mem=exactmap ...
As it's been almost three months since more information was requested, I'm closing this. If there is still a problem, please reopen with additional information.