Hi all,

I'm trying to install linux on a new hard drive, while leaving windows on the old. The new is formatted in ntfs, and has no free space. I wanted to shift 20 gigs off the new hdd into a Linux partition, and have had a lot of luck, bad luck. I have burned multiple GParted Live CDs and all of them give me kernel panic - tried to kill init. I have researched threads online for a few hours, and the problem now is too much information. My hardware is either relatively new or brand new, not legacy. No discs for any Live distro work either, I always get the same error. Something I keep seeing is the option of working through command line. I can do that, I just don't know any Unix commands yet. Setting the boot options with noapic noalpic is a recurring answer, but what does it do? Thanks.

Maybe it allows you to boot - does no damage, merely disables the option for that boot. Have a look at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apic for some background.

Kernel panic - not syncing: IO-APIC + timer doesn't work