How do I get into BIOS of old Dell system?

[Fraser Campbell]

Hi,

Migrated my firewall from P166 to 486-66, had an interesting problem during 
bootup.

Following the message "Freeing unused kernel memory: 64k" (perhaps not exact) 
the kernel paniced with the message "unable to handle kernel paging request" 
(again possibly not exact quote).

I tried passing the kernel a few parameters at boot time and found that by 
passing mem=15000k the system is able to boot just fine.  The system has 16MB 
of total memory.  While that is ok and I have the system booting just fine 
now 15MB leaves things running *very* tight, that extra 1MB could be pretty 
useful.

The only thing that I can think of is that some machines have a "memory hole" 
option in the BIOS that occurs between 15 and 16 MB, I wonder if mine has 
that?  Problem is I cannot get into the BIOS, I've tried numerous function 
keys, escape and delete.  It's an optiplex 486/66.  Any ideas how to get into 
the BIOS, or what else might be causing the issue?

Thanks!
-- 
Fraser Campbell <fraser-Txk5XLRqZ6CsTnJN9+BGXg at public.gmane.org>                 http://www.wehave.net/
Halton Hills, Ontario, Canada                             Debian GNU/Linux

--
The Toronto Linux Users Group.      Meetings: http://tlug.ss.org
TLUG requests: Linux topics, No HTML, wrap text below 80 columns
How to UNSUBSCRIBE: http://tlug.ss.org/subscribe.shtml