I have a few compaq proliant servers floating around the pad collecting dust. After tinkering with them one day I got them all to work one quad machine and one dual machine. I installed OpenBSD without a problem. I recently got my hands on a copy of RH9.0 so I figured 'eh why not'. I popped the CD in and came back to a nice screen that said that I didn't have enough memory. The quad machine has 384M and the dual has 256. Clearly this was a mistake.
(for now we'll talk about the quad system)
I went ahead and entered "linux mem=393216K" and watched as it booted up. Everything went along just fine until it reported a Kernel panic:
EXT2-fs: unable to read superblock
cramfs: wrong magic
FAT: unable to read boot sector
isofs_read_super: bread failed, dev=09:02, iso_blknum=16, block=32
Kernel panic: VFS: Unable to mount root fs on 09:02

At this point the system is frozen with the caps and scroll lock lights blinking. (percussive mantenance on the keyboard results in various keyboard: unknown scancode or sequence errors) After rebooting I try entering "linux mem=384M" and I achieved the same results. Mind you - the machine works fine as OpenBSD detects everything as necessary. At this point I'm rather stumped - I tried using "linux expert" however that returns me to the not enough memory error - "linux expert mem=XXXM" results in a kernel panic.

Since I don't use Red Hat, I can only assume that the default (non-enterprise RH release) kernel RH boots to facilitate in the install does not have SMP support.

Maybe those who do use RH9 can confirm this?

Incase anyone was wondering, these are Compaq Proliant servers. I don't have the Model and Series number (at this time) but they're on the machine itself. I'm wondering if it has something to do with the fact that it's a dual/quad machine. I've not had much experience with RH in the past few years - mostly FreeBSD/OpenBSD. I'm turning a new leaf and I'm in the process of converting my Win machines unto unix/linux machines. One will have slack (my first and most appreciated linux kernel based os) another freebsd another redhat etc jsut to get a feel for all of the various flavors and distrubutions. I definately need to but I'm not too far off from a .

I thank you for your relpy Azeem and I'll hit you up when I want to get back into the Slackware scene.

try this for the 256MB ram machine

linux mem=exactmap mem=0x9f000@0 mem=0xff00000@100000

for the other one, youll have to convert 401604608 to hex. thats the amoubnt of ram in bytes. i know hex, but i cant do that number in my head hehe. and i dont have any tools on hand, im at school :P
anyways, give those a try and tell me how it goes. this method works for me, all the ram gets detected, BUT the machine freezes up after running for a while. ive yet to discover why. good luck