Debian on a Proliant 2500
Awhile back, at work, I took control of an old Compaq Proliant 2500 that was heading for the recycle bin. It’s an old Pentium Pro 200MHz box with 360MB of RAM, a pair of 4.3GB SCSI drives, and an 18GB SCSI drive. I have some old PPro 200MHz CPU’s sitting around home somewhere, so I figured I’d beef it up a bit and find something to do with it (in support of my network admin/management duties).
It’s sat under my desk doing nothing for the last month or so and I finally got to messin’ around with it a couple of days ago. The object was to put Linux on it and then use it somehow for my network administration/management duties. I had a helluva time getting any Linux install CD to boot up on the damn thing. I’d get a kernel panic no matter what I tried. SUSE, Fedora Core 4, Red Hat Enterprise Linux 4 AS, Debian, Gentoo, and on and on. Kernel panic. Over and over again.
Finally, I came across an old post by Randy Rowe on www.cpqlinux.com in which he mentioned he had to play with the memory settings to get Red Hat 7.3 to install on a similar box.
I figured I’d give it a shot, since this box was exhibiting the same symptoms, mainly it would only detect 16MB of RAM and not the full 360MB. I grabbed my Debian netinstall CD, booted up with it and modified the boot parameters so that it booted with “linux mem=exactmap mem=640K@0 mem=359M@1M”. Bingo, that did the trick.
It’s not really a big deal, but I figured I’d post about it so that Google’d archive it and maybe help someone else if they have the same issue in the future with similar hardware.
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I have a Compaq Proliant 2500 (2) Pentium Pro CPU’s 320MB (3) 4.3MB SCSI drives, (1) DEC DLT2000 installed. This system is still working well hardware wise. My distro of choice is Debian so I wanted to see if I could put this old box to use again. Basically, I want to use it for a Bulletin Board system for my peers in IT OPS. Mostly, because it will be proof of concept for the department as far as Linux in concerned. But I want to note here that this option did not work with 2.6 kernel using Debian 3.1 disks. I have it working with the 2.4 which is fine. So for those trying to use 2.6 may have problems on this box. Good Luck.
TMC
Sorry for not mentioning that, Todd. To be honest, I wasn’t even aware of that. I stuck with the 2.4 kernel during the install so I didn’t run into the same issue as you. I’ll keep that in mind whenever I prepare to upgrade that box to the 2.6 series. Thanks.
for the 2.6 kernel replace mem with memmap. That morphs the example to “linux memmap=exactmap memmap=640K@0 memmap=359M@1Mâ€Â