How do I get into BIOS of old Dell system?

[Keith Mastin]

> 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?

Try Alt-F1 and Alt-F2

I think the memory hole is for SCO, no? :)) buggers... Is it possible that
you have a bad stick of RAM?

-- 
Keith Mastin
BeechTree Information Technology Services Inc.
Toronto, Canada
(416)429 9304
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