[ale] Red Hat installation question

[Alfred Grahame Leach]

I've just inheritted a Dell 425s/L at my summer internship, and been 
charged with installing Linux on it.  I'm attempting to install Red Hat 
3.0.3.  The problem I'm having is that the boot is failing with the 
following error:

------------------------------------------------------------------------
boot:
Loading linux........
Uncompressing Linux... large kernel, low 1M tight...


crc error


-- System halted
------------------------------------------------------------------------

_Sometimes_ when I boot specifying "linux ramdisk" or "linux floppy" the 
boot will succeed, but NOT CONSISTENTLY.  The machine is configured with 
8M of RAM, 640k conventional, 7456k extended, 0 upper.  I'm wondering if 
the problem is that there is no upper memory configured (and, thus the 
first 1M only has 640k, which is not enough for the boot image).  I've 
been trying to figure out how to do a hardware reconfigure on this 
machine, but to no avail - none of the standard boot-time key sequences 
work to get me into the hardware setup...  so any clues regarding how to 
do this on a DELL would likewise be appreciated.

Thanks in advance for any clues...

- Al


  +-----------------------+----------------------------+-------------------+
  | Al Leach              |  Georgia Tech              | Sailing is:       |
  | Graduate Student      |  College of Computing      |  hours and hours  |
  | MS, CS/Networking     |  Atlanta, GA 30332         |  of boredom,      |
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  | email: aleach at cc.gatech.edu                        |  moments of sheer |
  | WWW: http://www.cc.gatech.edu/people/home/aleach   |  stark terror...  |
  +----------------------------------------------------+-------------------+
  |     < Georgia Tech - Olympic Village of the 1996 Summer Olympics >     |
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