how to upgrade the Debian 3 kernel 2.4.18 to kernel 2.6 or bigmem- kernel

[#httpd]

Hi all
Dear friends,

we have a Dell 1850 with Debian with 2.4.18 kernel running some critical applications, now the issue is we need to upgrade the memory to 8 GB but the memory is detected by the bios itself, Operating system is not able to detect it, it is showing 3096MB of memory,

After a lot of googling and the artical in linux.com/archive/articles/119287 :: Got more than a gig of RAM and 32-bit Linux? Here's how to use it i came to know the solution i.e

1)I need to install the Bigmem-kernel to detect the ram more than 4Gb,
2) or change some kernel parameters in configuration file and rebuild the kernel
can some body help me how to do this
or
is there any another solution for this to update operating system to detect the more RAM

please do the needful,

Thanks
Chandra sekhar

[coopstah13]

if you have the installation CD's, then you might see a bigmem kernel on there

it would be very difficult to get a 2.6 kernel working and running on that system as it was designed around the 2.4 kernel

Debian sarge is really old now, and definitely unsupported. You run security risk by using this unpatched OS. I would recommend upgrading to latest debian OS. If you decide to do this, you should definitely take a backup. A bit image backup is the safest bet, though there are other tools that are faster since they only backup data on the disk.