HP Pavilion 8290 HANGS on boot 2.4/2.4-test9

[Werner]

HP Pavilion 8290, PII 400MHz, 256MB hangs on boot 2.4 and 2.4-test9 on RH7.0.
I tried to compile 2.4-test9 on RH 7.0 with gcc versions 2.96-54, 2.96-69,
and with kgcc 1.1.2-40 (egcs-2.91.66) without success.

The first and last message I get is: 
"Uncompressing Linux... OK, booting the kernel"

I never get to the start_kernel() function in main.c
I had no problems to get 2.4 (testx) running on IBM 300PL (PIII 500MHz, 192MB).
After running 'make mrproper' and 'make xconfig' I changed only SMP to No.

Can you please tell me how I can print debug information to the console in
arch/i386/boot/compressed/head.s and in arch/i386/kernel/head.S
_without_ impacting the rest of the assembly code?

# lspci
00:00.0 Host bridge: Intel Corporation 440BX/ZX - 82443BX/ZX Host bridge(rev 02)
00:01.0 PCI bridge: Intel Corporation 440BX/ZX - 82443BX/ZX AGP bridge(rev 02)
00:07.0 ISA bridge: Intel Corporation 82371AB PIIX4 ISA (rev 02)
00:07.1 IDE interface: Intel Corporation 82371AB PIIX4 IDE (rev 01)
00:07.2 USB Controller: Intel Corporation 82371AB PIIX4 USB (rev 01)
00:07.3 Bridge: Intel Corporation 82371AB PIIX4 ACPI (rev 02)
00:0a.0 Multimedia audio controller: Ensoniq ES1370 [AudioPCI]
00:0b.0 Ethernet controller: 3Com Corporation 3c905C-TX [Fast Etherlink] (rev 74)
00:0c.0 Ethernet controller: National Semiconductor Corporation: Unknown device 0020
01:00.0 VGA compatible controller: ATI Technologies Inc 3D Rage Pro AGP 1X/2X (rev 5c)

Let me know what I can do.

Thanks
Werner