I am a with Linux and after looking at a few screenshots on the web decided to give it a go. Ran into a few problems though along the way but kept going and got it going but now there's something I can't figure how to sort out it's a:

Kernel Panic :VFS: Unable to mount root fs on 01:30

When the error appears my Keyboard LED's flash like crazy and the Linux installation just freezes and won't go anywhere.
I've looked all over the web to try and find a solution and found some suggestions.e.g. disable the External Cache in bios no change and a few others but still no change. I am currently running on Winxp Prof and hope to dual boot Linux with it. But at the moment don't really want to give up but if I don't find a way to sort this out then I might consider it.

What bootloader are you using? Grub/LILO?

If maybe pointing Linux at the wrong partition.

What filesystem are you using on your /boot partition? It has to be compiled into the kernel, not as a module, or you'll get a freak out.

I've had that problem too, for me it usually seems to occur on a dual boot Windows/ Linux box after defragmenting the Windows partition.

It happened to me again a few days ago so I thought bugger it, backed up my Windows stuff (couldn't work out how to get back into Linux), deleted all my partitions and went 100% Linux, no problems so far and having to figure out how to do everything has sped up the learning process no end LOL.

Can you tell me if you need to download Grub/LILO or is it already built in ? If I need to download it is there a place where I can download it.

Tryed to search for both with Google but all I can find is instructions on it.

is the kernel panic coming up when you run the installer or have you already got something installed and this is on the first bootup? which distro are you using?

the installer should have asked you if you wanted to install a bootloader, it would have asked if you wanted to install either lilo or grub, do you know which one you chose?

The kernel panic comes up when it is half way through the installation I think anyway but it never asks me me what bootloader I want to use and to the distro I am using Mandrake Linux 9.1 if thats of any help to you. The only problem is I have downoaded 3CD's but it boots of the floppy and won't take anything of the cd could this cause the problem.

sounds to me as though the cd's you downloaded are corrupt, or its a hardware problem, you say you cant boot off the cd-rom, what are the specs for your computer, recent releases of mandrake/red hat style distros arnt very forgiving to old hardware. dont worry about the grub/lilo stuff the other ppl had assumed that you already had something installed.