Okay, so yesterday I was able to get redhat 7.1 installed, so it boots up, and now it has two options, linux or linux up, i can get it to run in linux up, but not linux, i think it has to do with the multiprocessor. this machine is a compaq proliant 6500, it freezes after it detects the scsi controllers and it say its verifying the partitions.

any error messages/output from /var/log/messages/dmesg? any custom drivers needed? have fscked the drives? missing modules?
I guess you need some error messages to support your troubleshooting...

I run 2.2.19-smp & 2.4.3-smp w/o probs, (tho its not on a Proliant).

I ran into this problem too: I was using a Proliant 1600 and it froze in SMP mode "detecting" the partitions. After looking at some other posts, I determined that the motherboard was too old to support the newer SMP Kernel. Something about being MPS 1.1/1.4 compliant. I don't understand too much about SMP except that it's a nightmare to program in and I barely scraped a credit at University in that subject.

Anyway, I managed to get a DL 580 with Dual 700 Xeons in it. Same problem. Considering how much trouble I went to source that, I wanted to throw it out the window - all 40 kilos of steel plating.

However, I found that if I upgraded the flash bios to the September 2001 version specifically written for Unix, I get a new message that says something like:

Hit F10 to enter System Partition Utilities (Already there)
Hit F9 to choose new Operating System (New)

When I hit F9, it let me choose Linux/Unixware. Next reboot, the blessed sign:

"Seawolf on a 2 processor i686"

You might want to reflash your bios to see if you have the option of specifying Linux.