How do I get into BIOS of old Dell system?

[James Knott]

Fraser Campbell wrote:
> 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?

Go to the Dell web site, to see if there's any info on it.


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