I have a problem, after installing mandrake 8.1 and starting the system, which is very unstable, I have to reboot. Which I do by pressing the power switch after I logged out. Than I receive a kernelpanic, vf : unable to mount root 03:01. What is the problem? How do I solve this?

You're using ext2 filesystem which doesn't like to be just turned off. Take a boot disk (or installation cd), boot from it and use
fsck /dev/hdxx
where xx is the root partition of your Linux install (usually hda5).
Could you write more about your stability problems?

I think I use hda1, not sure.
My stability problems occur in different ways, like the first time setupguide wont go any further, or suddenly it appears a matrix looking field at the top of the screen, and the cpu goes amokk. I will try the thing u told me.. thanx

Well, maybe I'm paranoid, but are you sure you were not hacked?

I am not connected to internet(sitting on another comp now). fsck didn´t work, it said it couldn´t find the kernel image. What should I do now? (I tried hda1, hda2, hda3.....)

if your system is getting unstable and hangs inside X, get yourself in the console (CTRL-ALT F1 - CTRL-ATL-F6) and type reboot using SU.

then it can umount your EXT2 partitions
if not neccessary: NEVER reset any type of *nix box using the reset button or powerswitch

I tried to do a reboot, the right way... but still the error appears...
WTF is this

n_swensson,


I recently built a new Athlon XP based box from scratch and underestimated the amount of cooling power I needed. When I first installed Red Hat 7.2 it was very unstable and froze up completely a few times. After doing about 2 hard boots, the ext3 file system became so hosed that I was getting segmentation faults and it was basically time to reinstall the operating system. It wasn't finding the paths for commands and was generally not cooperating at all.

Before the anti Red Hat comments start, let me reiterate that this was MY stupidity and not a problem with Red Hat. I have it on 4 different machines and it's stable on all, including the one that at first was unstable. The CPU was simply too hot.

If I were you, I'd give up on the current install and either try another distro, or at minimum reinstall Mandrake. Your filesystem is probably already pretty far gone. Save yourself the headache of trying to fix it. Just reinstall. I wasted a lot of time trying to make it happy and it never got happy.

HTH

Reinstall? well.. I dunno but I reinstall at least 4 times a day so far...... it is probably my fault, but nobody told me anything so far that has gotten me any further against the solution of this problem, I am right where I started....