Very Computer

Swap error after adding RAM?

I was running RedHat 4.2 on my P120 with 16 MB RAM and it was working
great, albeit a little slow.

I recently swapped my 2 8 MB SIMMs for 2 32 MB SIMMs and RedHat would
no longer boot properly.

Here is the error message I received (there is some missing because is
scrolls by SO FAST that even after several reboots I still was not
able to copy it all with 100% accuracy):

Activating Swap Partition
<order of this may be mixed up>
can't map
<I think> /etc/rc.d/sysinit.rc
fork:out of memory
<then over and over> do_wp_page: bogus page at address 400A4B24
(00105000)

I reloaded from CDROM completely, since I had not customized my system
much and still got the same error message.

I as able to reload and run Caldera Lite 1.0 without difficulty.

Any ideas? What additional details would you like?

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NOTE: To reply to me,  remove "NO-SPAM" from my e-mail address

Randy Millis
Calgary, Alberta
Canada
403-267-0222
Web: http://www.cal.shaw.wave.ca/~rmillis/

The fact that the system dies right after activating its swap space is
conincidental - it just happens to have wanted to use the memory at that
bad address. Other distributions do things in a different order, and
it's pretty much luck to hit the memory address that's flaky or just not
working right sometimes.

 If you don't think bad ram is the case, bring the system up in single
user mode (the command 'linux single' at the lilo prompt should do it
for you if you have a default install), and comment out your swap
partition in your /etc/fstab file. Then reboot the system, and see where
it dies. My guess is that it will die somewhere in the middle of
processing the startup scripts ...

Good luck,

Jan