Boot hangs with 16M ram

[Miro Torrielli]

My debian box doesn't seem to be able to boot with
16 megs ram!!

Dos and windows works fine, but Linux just hangs after
it does partition check. I boot with lilo, using both
kernels 2.0.17 & 18. The basic Debian boot disks crash
when mounting the ramdisk, dumping register values and
informing me of a protection fault. Help!!!!!!!!!!!!!!