SUSE 8.1 Boot error 28

[zaneryrie]

Hi all,

Well, I got my boxed set of Suse 8.1 pro last night and proceeded to install it on my Compaq Presario 6000. This machine is (was) already a dual boot win2k/Suse 7.3 machine. Worked great. I boot from a floppy to Linux.

I installed 8.1, and on the reboot received the following error:

Error 28: Selected item can not fit into memory

It's using grub as the boot loader. It looks like grub is not seeing enough base memory to load the kernel. (Says 512K on the base mem)

I already tried to add the line mem=512M but that didn't work. I searched the web all morning but really haven't found a lot of help for this problem. Some posts suggested installing LILO, but they seem to indicate that I need a functioning system which I don't have. I am still stuck in the middle of the install with this machine and really don't know how to add LILO at this point.

I have a copy of Partition magic and I thought about adding that boot loader to see what happened. At this point, I have resigned myself to reinstalling 7.3. Any ideas on what to do next?

Thanks in advance for the help!

ZR

 

[zaneryrie]

Since I posted this I ended up going back to 7.3 and sticking with that. It just works better with that particular machine. (Since I could not get 8.1 to boot, I guess I shoud say it is theonly onethat works...)

It seems that every other version is a winner, both with RedHat and Suse. So, form now on, I'll just skip a version and then upgrade.

Makes me wonder tho... Do these people ever test these distributions on retail machines? Seems like shooting yourself in the foot if your distro doesn't install cleanly on a stock machine from IBM or Compaq. One would think that would be a good path to foster acceptance.

zr