Hello out there

I have a very uncooperative Sony laptop that won't boot from USB CD, so I decided to install Linux by removing the HD and sticking it in my desktop machine. I made sure that the HD would be recognised as hda (I thought) by disconnecting the other HD in the desktop and installed from some old Slackware CDs I had lying about (8.1).

However, the laptop only gets part through the boot before a kernel panic hits, saying it can't mount the root filesystem and additonal parameters are needed at boot. In addition, Lilo shows only hdb is available to boot from.

Can anyone help me with the additional parameters needed, and can this be permanently fixed?

Cheers
Gordon

what distribution are you trying to use? What is the fs on the laptops HD? It might be that you don't have the fs compiled into your kernel, or that you don't have the initrd as one of you boot parameters

Wild guess here. When you disconnected the other hdd, you plugged yours in its spot? I dont know much about playing with and swapping around hardware, but hdb is a secondary drive in linux. So if you plugged it into a spare slot and installed and the hdd was secondary instead of primary, it gets messed up. Do you have a floppy drive? You may be able to reinstall lilo from a floppy, and it might work. Or ther are floppies that will load and detect your cd so you can install from it. Dunno, like I say, I dont know much about it. Maybe try changing the lilo options to hda or (hd0,1)