i went through the past threads and found nothing that was helpfull.i recently installed puppy linux 4.3 the most recent release. i tried to install it to my hard drive of my old dell latitude which has 64mb of ram laptop .i partitioned it and everything. it went through fine but when i:
1. restart or shutdown the computer the screen just turns yellow and flickers but never turns off.
2. try to boot up from the boot menu it says kernel panic -not syncing: vfs: unable to mount root fs on unknown -block (8,18)

this is the information that i got off the menu.lst

# GRUB configuration file '/boot/grub/menu.lst'.
# generated by 'grubconfig'. wed nov 7 04:52:30 2001
#
# The backup copy of the MBR for drive '/dev/sda' is
# here '/boot/grub/mbr.sda.13737'. You can restore it like this.
# dd if=/boot/grub/mbr.sda.13737 of =/dev/sda bs=512 count=1
#
# Start GRUB global section
#timeout 30
color light-gray/blue black/light-gray
# End GRUB global section
# Other bootable partition config begins
title Windows (on /dev/sda1)
rootnoverify (hd0,0)
makeactive
chainloader +1
# other bootable partition config ends
# Linux bootable partition config begins
title Linux (on /dev/sda2)
root (hd0,1)
kernel /boot/vmlinuz root=/dev/sda2 ro vga=normal
# Linux bootable partition config ends
# Other bootable partition config begins
title Windows (on /dev/sda4)
map (hd0,0)(hd0,3)
map (hd0,3)(hd0,0)
rootnoverify (hd0,3)
makeactive
chainloader +1
# Other bootable partition config ends
title Install GRUB to floppy disk (on /dev/fd0)
pause Insert a formatted floppy disk and press enter.
root (hd0,1)
setup (fd0)
pause Press enter to continue.
title Install GRUB to Linux partition (on /dev/sda2)
root (hd0,1)
setup (hd0,1)
pause Press enter to continue.
title - For help press 'c', then type: 'help'
root (hd0)
title - For usage examples, type: 'cat /boot/grub/usage.txt'
root (hd0)
title Puppy Linux 431 frugal
rootnoverify (hd0,1)
kernel /puppy431/vmlinuz pmedia=atahd psubdir=puppy431 nosmp
intrd /puppy431/intrd.gz

also i am able to set up the internet on it but have to use ndiswrapper. everytime i turn off the computer i have to set ndiswrapper back up.

try changing
to

yea so i tried changing the code to the one posted up above. and it didnt help. now everytime i try to boot up linux it says error

Are you able to boot the Windows partition?
Can you check while using the live CD if /boot/vmlinuz was actually installed on the sda2 partition?
Do you have another USB drive connected to the computer when booting?

yes i am able to log into the windows partition.
no i dont have anything plugged into the usb port.
how do i check to see if /boot/vmlinuz was installed on the sda2 partition

I haven't used puppy for some time, but doesn't it mount your internal drive? Just use your file manager and open the folder "mount" (or "media") and look for the folder for the sda2 partition. Open that folder and goto the /boot folder and see if there is a file (or redirection link) to vmlinuz.

Also check if an initrd file was written to the /boot folder.