Need Help!

[shaneandstaci]

I am new to Linux. I have a very old Compaq Proliant server here and I wanted to install Linux. I have Red Hat 7.3. I installed this dist. on a machine in the college lab with no problems at all. I made the boot floppy from the CD and tried to boot into the installation. Just after de-compression of the kernel the program tells me that I don't have enough RAM to install. This struck me as very strange because there is 131MB of RAM in this machine. I did have Windows 2000 Advanced Server running on this thing until yesterday. Does anyone have any clue? I sure don't.

[DMR]

Which boot image (*.img) did you write to the floppy?

What are the full system specs of the computer?

[mdwatts]

You could try specifying the amount of memory you have during the installation.

At the first install prompt, add

mem=131M

and see if that helps.

I'm not positive that I have the correct syntax of the mem command, but you can have a look at the Redhat installation documentation on their site to verify.

[shaneandstaci]

I used wrawrite to copy the booy.img to the floppy. The specs to the best of my knowledge are as follows.
Dual P100's
Compaq slot 7 drive array
131072KB RAM
Slot 7 Smart SCSI Array Controller v. 2.26
CD-ROM is SCSI
Standard floppy drive
BIOS is Compaq BIOS E14 (5/12/97)

I tried typing this at the first screen:linux mem=131M noprobe
and:linux mem=131M
When I did this I didn't get the annoying message as before.
I got a hangup and some kernal error messeges such as:
could not find super image or unable to mount root file system.

[shaneandstaci]

Sorry, not booy.img
boot.img

[shaneandstaci]

OK here is the exact message.
This is displayed on the screen:

EXT2-fs: unable to read superblock
cramfs: wrong magic
FAT: unable to read boot sector
isofs_read_super: bread failed, dev=09:00, iso_blknum=16, block=32
Kernel panic: VFS: Unable to mount root fs on 09:00


Then it just stops everything and I have to turn the power off and back on to do anything
The keyboard doesn't even respond.

Any thing you can think of to help would be greatly appreciated.
Shane

[DMR]

Turn off Power Management in your BIOS; it seems to be giving a lot of people grief when installing Redhat 7.3.

[shaneandstaci]

I can't get into the bios to change anything.
This is a real ancient machine.
I physically looked inside and it has 8 16MB chips plugged in the mainboard.
I am loading Win 2000 Adv Server at the moment so I don't understand why RH won't even install.