kernel panic

[Peter Roopnarine]

Hi,
  I hope that someone out there can help me. I have an 8-way Opteron running 
Fedora 5. Yesterday I attempted to add 8 Gb of ECC RAM to the current 8 Gb of 
ECC RAM, and upon selecting the OS from the GRUB menu got a kernel panic 
screen. I've since removed the new RAM, returning the memory configuration to 
exactly the starting state, and still no luck. I've also tried to run 
memtest86 but it hangs, and I cannot boot into linux rescue mode. The message 
that I get there is:
kernel direct mapping tables up to 200000000 @ 8000-8000
PANIC: early exception rip ffffffff801172db error 0 cr2 ffffffffff5fd023
PANIC: early exception rip ffffffff801172db error 0 cr2 ffffffffff5fd023

The system reports 7166 MB of memory present. I am going to try the memory 
modules one at a time, and hope that the problem lies there. A different 
hardware problem would not be good, and a hard disk problem would be 
horrible.
  Thanks for any help!
-- 
Dr. Peter D. Roopnarine, Assoc. Curator
Department of Invertebrate Zoology & Geology
California Academy of Sciences
875 Howard St.
San Francisco CA 94103

Phone: (415) 321-8271
FAX: (415) 321-8615
WWW: http://www.calacademy.org/research/izg/roopnarine/peter.htm
"there's a mansion on the hill"