Hi,

I have Mandrake 9.2 installed in a Gateway notebook, everything worked fine until I wanted to reinstall win xp. Fearing that windows would "hide" my linux partition, I tried to explore a little bit the bootloader parameter and I guess I did something wrong.

After installing successfully windows, I reinstalled my linux bootloader with the install CD.

At boot I can choose between win and linux, choosing win works fine but when choosing linux the computer freezes after a while.


I use graphical lilo as boot laoder.

During booting, I get the following lines with an error message at the end and
the computer freezes!

Here are all the lines that are screenplayed:

md: ... autorun DONE.
Initializing Cryptographic API
NET4: Linux TCP/IP 1.0 for NET4.0
IP Protocols: ICMP, UDP, TCP, IGMP
IP: routing cache hash table of 2048 buckets, 16Kbytes
TCP: Hash tables configured (established 16384 bind 32768)
Linux IP multicast router 0.06 plus PIM-SM
NET4: UNix domain sockets 1.0/SMP for Linux NET4.0.
Resume Machine: Unable to find suspended-data signature ( - misspelled?
RAMDISK: Compressed image found at block 0
Freeing initrd memory: 237k freed
VFS: Mounted root (ext2 filesystem).
Mounted devfs on /dev
swsusp 1.0.3: kswsuspd starting
Red Hat nash version 3.4.43-mdk starting
Mounting /proc filesystem
Create root device
Mounting root filesystem with flags noatime
VFS: Can't find ext2 filesystem on dev ide0(3,2).
mount: error 22 mounting ext2 flags noatime
well, retrying without the option flags
VFS: Can't find ext2 filesystem on dev ide0(3,2).
mount: error 22 mounting ext2
well, retrying read-only without any flag
VFS: Can't find ext2 filesystem on dev ide0(3,2).
mount: error 22 mounting ext2
pivotroot: pivot_root(/sysroot,/sysroot/initrd) failed: 2
Remounting devfs at correct place if necessary
Mounted devfs on /dev
Freeing unused kernel memory: 152k freed
Kernel panic: No init found. Try passing init= option to kernel.

----------------------------------------------------
I have tried to make an upgrade using the install CD but the computer freezes too after showing this message:
An error occured
output in file /mnt/etc/hosts failed: NO such file or directory


I am not familar yet with the rescue mode commands but I read in the rescue help that this console should be used if parameters have been changed in /etc/fstab and system doesn't boot. Fix the offending line in rescue mode.
I guess that is what happened since I changed some parameter in the bootloader while trying to prepare the install of windows xp.

I have already reinstalled the boot loader using the install CD but the problems remains.

Now, xp works properly but I can't enter my linux partition.


Do anybody know how I should fix this?
Thanks a lot,

NIko

I think you are missing this line in your bootloader.

initrd=/boot/initrd.img

The kernel part appears to be fine. It just needs to know where the init file is.

Hope that helps

Thanks for your comment Dalek,

I am actually a newbie. Do you mean I have to type
initrd=/boot/initrd.img
somewhere.

The only place that allows me to type something is the rescue mode when using the install CD (press F1, then type rescue)

There, I typed
[root@rescue]# initrd=/boot/initrd.img

and nothing happens, the []# appears in a new line.

When typing only
init
it displays:
Usage: init 0123456SsQqAaBbCcUu

I also entered in /boot and list what was inthere typing ls command
and it only showed
grub/

By typing 'grub', I got some info as if the command language was different there.

I typed
initrd=/boot/initrd.img
there again and got this message:

Error 19: Linux Kernel must be loaded before initrd.

How should I load the kernel?

Please give me step-by-step instruction I am really lost...
Thanks

You need to add that to your bootloader. It should boot after that.

I don't know how to do that because I'm lucky enough to not use windoze at all. Never had windoze take over my bootloader.

For lilo it should look something like this:

You will have to replace with the exact locations of your system though. It appears it is there except for the initrd=/boot/initrd.img line.

The kernel appears to be booting, you should be able to add that initrd= line to the bootloader and be OK.

That help any?

Some other guru that has actually done this before lend a hand.