I posted this to the newbie forum but it didn't seem to be getting any responses. I cannot believe that my situation is entirely unique.

I have tried several time to install Red Hat Linux 8.0 on 2 new machines that I built. They have an ASUS A7N266VM motherboard with Athlon XP 1700 processors and 512Mb of PC2100 memory. After the install finishes and reboots, the kernel will not load. If I install with the GRUB bootloader, I get something to the effect: Error 28: Selected item cannot fit into memory. When I install the LILO bootloader, after POST an “L” prints to the screen and everything stops.

I have tried both boot loaders loading from the MBR and GRUB loading from the boot partition. I have tried the "Force use of LBA32" option, whatever that is.

All options so far have yielded "Error 28: Selected item cannot fit into memory"


Any suggestions would be greatly appreciated.



BTW, My Red Hat 8.0 disks load fine on an old Compaq 350Mhz machine with 128Mb of RAM. Also, I can load Mandrake 8.2 on the new machines with no problems other than a few driver issues.



Thanks in advance,

I'm not a hardware guy by any means, but is the ASUS a brand spankin' new board?, if it is, maybe the kernel doesn't know what to do with it. If the board is newer than the RH8 release (which is over six months old, which seems ancient in Linux years!),their could be compatibility problems.

Seriously, I've heard of stranger things happening.

Can you boot the system with a floppy?
Perhaps the board is not passing the memory info to the bootloader and/or kernel, or the kernel can't get it from the board.

Did you try passing a memory option to lilo or grub?

Something like,
kernel /boot/vmlinuz-2.4.18-26.8.0 ro root=LABEL=/ hdd=ide-scsi mem=512M

Wish I could be more of a help
Good Luck.

regards,
gtnorton

The board is brand new in that I just bought it but I understand that it has been discontinued by ASUS. I'm guessing that it's been on the market for about 18months. While researching this problem, I have found it mentioned by several others on the net. Almost always refering to an ASUS motherboard, most always the A7N266-VM. I did find one poster who said he solved the problem by installing GRUB .93 instead of the .92 that comes with RH8. I have been working with that right now. However, since I purchased these computers and RH8 to learn linux, I have not been so successful at upgrading the bootloader on an os that wont boot. Talk about initiation by fire.

Let's go here for now.

I downloaded grub_0.93+cvs20030102.orig.tar.gz.

I unzipped, un-archived it, and cd to that directory.

I followed the instructions that came with the package.

I ran, in order:

./configure

make

make install

Which did alot of stuff. But when I reboot from the HDD it's still using GRUB .92.

I went back and read the install and it said you could use a --prefix=PATH option wiht ./configure to tell it where to install, but that you shouldn't need to because GRUB knew where it needed to be. Well, obviously not. So, I tried to re-./configure, re-make, and re-make install 2 more times. Once to the /boot/grub directory and once to the /boot directory. After each attempt, I rebooted and GRUB .92 was still being used. Any ideas?