David I. Wright wrote:
I have a Compaq Proliant 2500. It is a dual Pentium Pro 200 system with 2 Pentium Pro 200 /512 cache processors and has 512 Meg of memory. The memory is 4 each 128 Meg sticks installed in the 4 memory slots.
When I try to install Fedora by booting up on the first CD and hit enter with no options it displays many lines of stuff and then displays a message box that says I do not have enough RAM to do the install. This message box has an OK button in it that is highlighted. If I hit enter the system runs a halt system and then reboots. If I type the following at the command line:
linux mem=512M
indications of likely problems with memory. :-)
It then displays many lines of stuff with the following being the last four lines:
Net4: Unix domain sockets 1.0/SMP for Linux NET4.0 EXT2-fs: unable to read superblock isofs_read_super: bread failed, dev=09:02 iso_blknum=16, block=32 Kernel panic: VFS: unable to mount root fs on 09:02
I have tried RH 9.0 and Suse 9.0 with the same general results except the dev=xx:xx was different for Suse 9.0.
One curios note. I tried to install Suse 8.0 awhile back and managed to do so but it was by accident. It would not install without some options on the command line. After much searching doc's etc. I found that I could disable the probing for USB stuff by using the following on the command line:
hwprobe=-c03:*:*
It seemed to insist that I had a USB mouse instead of the PS/2 mouse that was plugged into the box.
Bios settings maybe? or a bad/unsupported board. Or maybe still memory problems that confuse it.
This got me further into the install process but would still hang. I then discovered mem=512M option but it only got me a little further into the install process where it would also just hang. I had given up on this when I started checking some extra memory sticks I had in order to identify what size they were. I removed one of the 128 Meg memory sticks and used this memory slot to test a stack of memory sticks I had. One at a time I would check a stick of memory put it in a stack for its size and try the next one. The last one was a 16 Meg or 32 Meg, I don't remember, but I went ahead and let it boot with the two options I had previously been using trying to install Suse 8.0. I watch in disbelief as it booted up and let me start the install. I was able to install and use the system with Suse 8.0 Of course I tried all this with Fedora, RH9 and Suse9 but no luck.
you tested the ones you had as spares, but did not individually test the ones already installed. :-(
Any suggestions were to look next?? Oh one other thing I did run 3 passes of the memory test on the memory install in the system in case that last 128 Meg memory stick was bad. I tried the same memory configuration for the Fedora, RH9 and Suse9 install but no luck.
You can identify is it is a bad memory stick by stripping all but one stick out, then trying the install.
If it appears to work, then retry with a different stick.
repeat until you have tested all 4 DIMMs or until it fails on one
( If you need to use dual dimms with this dual processor system it simply means you become a little more creative to test all the dimms, since you would need to test 2 at a time and rotate them until you have tried all possible combinations)
FC will install easily with only 128mb of memory, and this will allow testing one at a time without guessing where the problem is.
Only after testing all the installed memory should you look at other hardware.
memtest86 is another tool that *might* assist in identifying memory problems, but is not always 100% correct. (a failure is usually correct, but a pass is not always so.)
