hello,
i installed on a clean harddrive win98 and then SuSe 8.2...the installation of SuSe went pretty fine with no hassle at all...however when the first boot of the system took place it didn't get too far....after a very short period of time the LED's of the caps lock and the scroll lock began to blink and on the screen the final message was this:
kernel panic: No init found Try passing init=option to kernel...
i really don't know what to do...
i tried different configs for the installation but none would work!!! :(((
help me! i'm desparate!
here's how my partition table looks...

/boot ext3 40Mb
C:\ Fat32 3Gb
[Extended partiton]
swap ext3 256Mb
/ ext3 3Gb
/usr ext3 4Gb
/var ext3 1,5Gb
/tmp ext3 2Gb
/home ext3 25Gb(or somewhere around)
D:\ FAT32 18Gb(or somewhere around)

if anyone can help me quickly, i'd be much obliged! cause without my linux i can't do anything...i keep this win98 just for photoshop and emergency using of internet(in cases like these)..... every help is appreciated!!!
thank you in advance!!!

did you make a boot floppy?

does it do the same thing?

do you know the device names for your partitions?

yes, i made a boot floppy but it does the same thing...even the recovery system which i can start from this boot floppy gives the same error...
and yes, i know the device names for my partitions...they're hda1 to 10...actually...

and here are a few lines before the the final error message about the kernel panic...

Ext3-fs: mounted filesystems with ordered data mode
VFS: mounted root(ext3 filesystem) readonly
trying to move old root to /initrd... failed
unmounting old root
trying to free ramdisk memory... okay
freeing unused kernel memory: 172K freed
Warning: unable to open initial console

and here comes the final error message stating:
kernel panic: No init found Try passing init=option to kernel...


i hope this can help you understand what's going on....

please...anybody???

you still didn't identify your partitions but I guess you can figure out which one to use.
try this

linux root=/dev/??? init=/bin/bash



"linux" is the name listed in the boot menu.