Insert distributed boot diskette release 6.1, reset computer. press <enter> at "boot:" prompt [entering "expert<enter>" and "text<enter>" provide same crash. screen (not exact replica) shows: loading vmlinuz ..... uncompressing ... booting the kernel linux version 2.2.12-20BOOT detected 199744589 Hz proc console colour VGA+ 80x25 Calibrating delay loop ... 199.07 BoGoMIPS Memory 175908k/180224k available (964k kernel code, 416k reserved) \ 2060k data, 60k init) general protection fault: 0000 cpu: 0 EIP: 0010:[<c011f01a>] eflags: 00010296 eax: 9f ebx: cafff008 ecx: f..f edx: c0402000 esi: 28 edi: f..f ebp: caffffe0 esp: c0217f40 ds: 18 es: 18 ss: 18 process swapper (id:0, process nr 0, stackpage = c0217000) stack: c02005a0 286 f..f 212 1 15 20 0 c011f211 c02005a0 15 0 20 0 0 c011e873 c02005a0 15 0 9800 0 0 c0229f03 5a calltrace [<c011f211>][<c011e873>][<c01c8c00>] [<c01ca4be>][<c0106000>][<c0106000>][<c0100176>] code: 89 07 8b 4c 24 10 8b 09 89 4c 24 10 83 ee 01 73 b5 c7 01 00 Kernel panic: attempted to kill the idle task! in swapper task -- not syncing enabled memory test (ECC memory) no difference changed CMOS "operating system" "W/NT" and "Other" no difference This system runs W95oem2 and W/NT4sp3 with no known problems
The problem appears to be that memory is is incorrectly sized. By specifying mem=128M on the boot command, booting of the installation disk now succeeds. This is still a bug in memory sizing but the option is a work around.
Memory sizing is all done by the BIOS. Refer to vendor for BIOS updates I think. mem= seems a sensible solution to work around the BIOS