knoppix not boooting a DELL OptiPlex GX110

Hi,
.
while trying to boot a DELL OptiPlex GX110, knoppix is giving me lots of reading writing errors. The last of which is:
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not syncing: Attemtep to kill init!
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After searching in this NG I got the advice to use as cheat code:
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koppix nodam mem=512M
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But then the booting process stops at:
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Uncompressing Linux... OK, booting from kernel.
.
nothing else appears to be happening
.
I have tried 3.4 and 4.2 (or 4.0.2) versions of knoppix
.
The problem might not entirely be knoppix related, I think this box might not be reporting/accessing the total amount of RAM properly. Actually the BIOS shows only 8Ms
.
How can you use memtest to see how much RAM the BIOS reports to the OS?
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I just installed 512M of RAM on this machine
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Any ideas of how to fix these problems?
.
Thank you


not syncing: Attemtep to kill init!