i am a definite newbie to linux, so much so that i gave my 120gb hard drive to a friend for him to sort out. he said that he had created 7 partitions, hda1 through 7. 2 had ubuntu and debian on 1 was blank for an install of windows and the others were for swap, grub and corrupted data. i put the drive in but before doing so changed the jumpers from master to slave. all five possible boot situations, 3 from ubuntu, 2 from debian then did not work and arrived at the same error:

pivot_root: No such file or directory
/SBIN/INIT 426: cannot open /dev/console
Kernel panic attempted to kill init!

I checked in knoppix for the console file in dev and it is present in both partitions. so i took the hard drive out, changed jumper back to master and rebooted - same error. after searching on web for explanations i found that the jumper switch could have been the problem as it changes the hard drive allocation. It did not give any instructions how to fix this however and so i decided to post this. If anyone can give me any help to try and fix this problem would be greatly appreciated.

Jonathan

PS Windows can only 'see' the 40gb partition created for it as it is fat32.

noticed that there is a mistake, last sentence of first paragraph should read:

When i booted there were 5 possible boot situations given to me by grub, 3 from ubuntu, and 2 from debian, all of them did not work and came back with the following error message:

Have been advised to recompile the kernel, i do not know how to do this however. So.. how do i recompile the kernel without losing any data or reinstalling linux