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From Bugzilla Helper: User-Agent: Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 5.01; Windows NT 5.0) When Installing 7.1 on a compaq proliant 2500 (Bios rev E24(12/01/99) ) with a compaq SMART-2/P Raid Array Controller (rev C, v1.94)and 544M ram, the kernel panics before any options come up. If it is of any help, if I type > linux mem=544 dd the panic happens before it prompts for the driver disk ... Reproducible: Always Steps to Reproduce: 1. at the boot prompt type linux mem=544M Actual Results: (first line for context) NET4: Unix domain sockets 1.0/SMP for Linux NET4.0 VFS: Cannot open root device "" or 08:41 Please append a correct "root=" boot option Kernel panic: VFS: Unable to mount root fs on 08:41 Expected Results: install continues -the mem= setting is necessary as it doesn't recognize enough of the available memory to go through the install, although, without the setting it looks like the install gets further along (blue background with red error box, still not really into the install) -the machine is dual PPro 200 -it happens with smaller mem= settings -it happens booting from atapi cd or from floppy -the system currently runs redhat 7.0 smoothly -I pulled out the array controller and it gives the same error for attempted install -the system also has an ide hard drive
Sounds like this is either a kernel or a syslinux problem. Changing component to the kernel. We've started to see a few of these.
I've installed Linux once on such a machine. The trick is to get the bios right. Could you try appending "noapic" as 2nd option to the mem= line ? eg mem=543 noapic (hint: always go at least 1Mb less than actual memory, as the bios uses about 1Mb)
I attempted with both of the following; neither worked mem=500 noapic mem=500 noapic nosmp
*** This bug has been marked as a duplicate of 36940 ***
Changed to 'CLOSED' state since 'RESOLVED' has been deprecated.