Gentoo wont boot on my 450 (not enough memory for initrd)

highrez · n00b Joined: 11 Feb 2004 Posts: 5

I've done several Gentoo sparc installs, mostly on slower Ultra5s. I'm trying to install on a 450 (4 procs 4gigs ram), but I get an error about there not being enough memory for initrd.

This thing has 4 gigs of ram, so I KNOW there is enough memory. I tried passing "mem=4096M" to silo, but that didn't help. I also ready that its possible I have too many scsi controllers in the machine (currently 5), but I havent wanted to remove any of them as I actually have enough drives (no kiddin) to make use of them... So I'm at a loss as to what to do.

I dont have Solaris (i'm gonna download it tonight, I guess - it does have an install on it, that works but I just dont have media), but FreeBSD boots just fine (off the CD)... So I'm guessing its not a hardware issue. Any help would be much appreciated!

Weeve · Retired Dev Joined: 30 Oct 2002 Posts: 641

This is with the LiveCD or an additionally generated initrd (i.e. genkernel)?

highrez · n00b Joined: 11 Feb 2004 Posts: 5

Weeve · Retired Dev Joined: 30 Oct 2002 Posts: 641

There should be a new experimental LiveCD out in the next couple of days that may work better for you. I'll post a followup when it's available.

highrez · n00b Joined: 11 Feb 2004 Posts: 5

Got past this problem... The kernel boots, I get my drives setup I start untarring stage3 and then "kernel couldn't handle null pointer dereferrence". I should admit, however - I was trying Reiser, and under heavy disk IO.