Crash on boot with 2.3.38

[Richard B. Johnson]

Linux 2.3.38 (with initial ramdisk support) crashes upon startup at
the point where it usually announces that it's freeing unused ramdisk
memory.

This is a SMP machine so I get two subsequent watchdog timeouts which
overwrite the screen information so I can't copy down the text from the
original crash. FWIW the original crash is a 'can't handle NULL pointer'
crash.

Cheers,
Dick Johnson

Penguin : Linux version 2.3.36 on an i686 machine (400.59 BogoMips).