Did you ever find a solution to this problem? I'm bumping against the same issue now.
 
I've got an NEC Powermate v133e (Classic Pentium, 133 mHz) with a Polaroid BurnMax32 CD burner, 48 meg memory, and two hard drives, a 15 gig Maxtor and a 1 gig Western Digital. Both are tied to a Promise Ultra ATA-66 controller card. Both have been checked and verified to be error-free. Both drives have been wiped clean, and a 5 gig primary FAT32 partition has been created.
 
The 15 gig Maxtor is primary master, the WDC is primary slave, the CD burner is secondary master.
 
I'm trying to get Damn Small Linux 1.2 installed, but the boot floppy keeps dying with exactly the same Bad EIP value and kernel null pointer error you got.
 
I can get the system to boot from a Win98 floppy, and I can even run an install CD for Win98SE, but I can't get Linux to boot from a CD in the drive (yes, BIOS is configured to check) nor from a floppy.
 
Clues appreciated.

Perhaps it has something to do with the kernel on the Damn Small Linux floppy. Try an older version if you can find it - then update.

Bad EIP values can be hardware related. Perhaps the Promise Ultra ATA-66 controller card.
 
But I also notice that you may not have enough ram to run the system totally in ram. i don't know much about DSL, but I thought that you needed at least 128 mb of ram to run totally in ram space?
 
Also, what speed did you burn the iso image at to the cd> Are you using cdrw or cd-r media?
 
I would pose the question on the DSL forum to get a quick answer.

>Perhaps the Promise Ultra ATA-66 controller card.
 
That has been the focus of my suspicions too.
 
I knew the CD burner was also a headache, so I pitched it and swapped in another drive that is working much better. But it doesn't resolve the EIP issue.
 
The system BIOS can't handle larger hard drive sizes; thus the addition the Promise controller. It went in together with the 15 gig Maxtor back in '98 or so.
 
The controller card has its own BIOS that apparently overrides the system BIOS, and I've yet to locate a way to get at the card's BIOS settings. Even the manufacturer's site doesn't provide any help.
 
At this point, I'm searching for an updated system BIOS. If I can locate one that will enable support for the larger drive, I could just take out the ATA controller and revert back to system BIOS. This would mean giving up the additional speed the ATA-66 card provides, but since I plan to use the system mainly as a print server, that's not a big problem.
 
BTW - yes, 48 meg is too low for a RAM drive, but a generous swap file will suffice for my purposes.
 
I burned the DSL disk at 16x on a Pocket CD-R rated for 24x. It works fine on other systems.
 
Posted to the DSL forum. Didn't lead to anything useful.

This is a hardware issue. Could be the promise card that the DSL kernel does not like.
 
Swap space is fine, as long as the boot device can detect and use it. Otherwise there is not enough memory to load in total RAM.
 
Another clue;
 

Quote: can get the system to boot from a Win98 floppy, and I can even run an install CD for Win98SE, but I can't get Linux to boot from a CD in the drive (yes, BIOS is configured to check) nor from a floppy. 
Older PC system cdrom drives do not like home burned cd's. Commercially burned ones, such as the Win 98 disk are made to be compatible with most drives. This would explain if you used the cd burned at more than 4X (in your case 16X) in a newer cdrom drive/system and it booted fine, but failed in an older cdrom drive.
 
In fact, some are so finicky that they seem only to boot in the cdrw drive that they were burned from. Older cdrom drives also do not always like cdrw disks, but will boot cd-r disks fine burned at a slow speed.
 
Finally, if you burned the cd in a newer (host) system with a cdrw drive and also make the boot floppy in the same system, then attempted to boot DSL in the older system with the same boot floppy and DSL cd, this can be an issue. If the disk geometry or partition scheme is different from the host machine, then the bad EIP value can occur. Enter how the promise bios reads the drive partitions.

hi friendds,
I got the sollution for bad EIP value.....Kernal Panic problem.....
To change network card present slot into different slot.
Again it will come, replace the network card.
 
with regards,
Chandran.

The bad eip value is a hardware issue. It may be a NIC problem, or, as mentioned above, a pci add-on controller issue.
 
The kernel panics, as it is unable to detect or use the piece of hardware correctly using the base kernel modules. Most likely it is an issue with the kernel being able to set the pci address, or PNP is set in the bios.
 
Sometimes there is a conflict with another slot, especially in systems that share resources between slots. You used to see this a lot with pci slots next to isa slots, where the resources were shared. Or, a pci slot next to the agp slot. Moving the pci card to another slot might solve the issue, resolving the apparent conflict.

You can still use all of that 15 gig HD.
I assume from your post your system can
handle a 5 gig HD.
 
So do this.
Boot with win98 floppy.
Run fdisk.
 
First be sure your 15 gig HD is selected.
 
Select "1". (Create Primary Dos Partition
or extended DOS partition.)
 
1. Select "Create Extended DOS Partition"
and make another 5 gig partition.
 
2. Select "Creat Logical DOS Drive in Extended DOS Partition".
 
Repeat 1 and 2 .
 
Now your computer thinks the 15 gig HD is three 5 gig HDs.
You can use one just for a swap file if you want.
 
I had to learn this years ago to utilize a 10gig HD I bought
for a 66mhz Packard Bell that couldn't use over 1 gig per HD.
The machine thought I had 8 HDs and the drive still had unused space.
And ,WOW!, I had a whole 8 megs of ram.