Booting Etch on a Proliant 8000 (6 CPU)

[Mateo Obregon <mateo_obregon@fidic.org.co>]

Hello-

We have not been able to get any of the Etch installer images to boot on a 
Compaq Proliant 8000 (6 Pentium III XEON CPUs, 3GB RAM, Compaq Smart Array 
controller). The machines abruptly resets just after "SERIO ..." messages.

It was running Mandrake Enterprise 8.1 with a hitch before (kernel 2.4, 
cpqarray)

We did manage to get it to load a Debian Sarge Netinst CD, but this kernel 
only uses 1 CPU.

We have tried many combinations of "acpi=off", noapic, nolapic, nosmp, debug, 
but none of these kernel options have worked with Debian Etch.

I imagine that we can use aptitude to upgrade all packages to the latest 
stable release, and compile a new kernel, but what options should we select 
for this kernel to run the 6 CPUs?

Thank you.

Mateo.
-- 
--
Mateo Obregón
Fundación Instituto de Inmunología de Colombia --FIDIC--
Avenida 50 #26-00, Bogotá, Colombia
--