While using bare.i as a boot disk for Slackware, things work fine, then I get a message reading:

VFS: cannot oprn root device 03:43
Kernel Panic: VFS: Unable to mount root fs on 03:43

Anyone know what this means? Is my boot disk corrupted? Is my cd-rom drive not being detected? Any constructive reponses would be greatly appreciated.

*9.1 Yeah, I'm an idiot

Is this an old laptop? It may be that your hard drive has some serious problems (badblocks). I've never heard of this happening with the slack bootdisk, i'm fairly sure it's pretty much fullproof. I'm willing to bet it's a problem with your hardware.

Try another live cd like knoppix and see if that works.

Hey man,

I ended up getting it to work on the laptop, and it runs fine except for one single problem. The audio card is detected, but all of the sound I hear is gargled and/or extremely annoying white noise. So with that being the current problem, do you have any other input?

I setup Fedora on my main box, and Quake runs insane on it. I ended up getting 50+ fps, putting me at 250 fps. And, the way that the graphics were rendered completely gave it a new look. It runs way better than it did on my win2kpro setup. I'll talk to you later.

Are you using OSS or Alsa?
And what is your sound card?

You can find this out by doing a

This will list all devices running on pci bus and filter through them to find anything relating to audio

I think you can find if your running OSS or alsa by doing

lsmod | grep snd

If there's output your likely running alsa


By the way that fps is awsome, I get like 40 if i'm lucky, my card sucks. I get about 10 on average in enemy territory, it's pretty much unplayable, but still fun. I'm looking at getting a new one but I have no agp bus (shitty dells).

Multimedia audio controller: ESS Technology ES1969 Solo-1 Audiodrive (rev 2)

Well that's what I found after trying grep -i audio /proc/pci

And, I'm running OSS. (Which is an assumption based on that command not working)

I'm going to attemp to get ET running now. Later.

This looks like a common problem with your sound card on older kernels. Look at this thread:
http://lists.debian.org/debian-lapto.../msg00042.html
Although they're talking about an old kernel 2.2.x, I assume it wasn't fixed in 2.4.x, becuase of the switch to alsa. If you want to fix this I would probably upgrade the kernel to 2.6.7 or something and switchover from oss to alsa. These are beyond the scope of this post so you'll have to figure it out yourself.