First, the system specs:

AMD Athlon XP 2700+
ASUS A7V8X motherboard
1-gig Kingston HyperX 333
ATI x1950pro
western digital caviar hard drive
DVD drive
DVD/RW drive


I'm trying to install Fedora 7. I want to try out different OSs, but mainly I want to become proficient with Linux. The problem I am having is right when the DVD tries to boot up. I've never made it into the install screen.

I've burned the ISO to a DVD, as per the instructions, and attempted to boot from it to start the installation. It starts doing a few things, some pre-installation checklist stuff probably. I am then left with this at the bottom of the screen:

kernal panic: VFS: unable to mount root FS on 03:01

Now, I know you guys would like to have the entire read-out of what the screen says, but I couldn't for the life of me find out how to back it all up. If someone knows how to accomplish that, I will gladly post it up here. Other things it said that stood out were...

ds: No socket drivers loaded
EXT2: unable to read superblock

I think it could be the kernel...but every guide that I've come accross that details the adjusting of the kernal assumes that I have Linux already installed!!

I am installing to a secondary hard drive. It's unpartitioned. I left it like that because I read the installation will get to partitioning it eventually. I know I'm doing something stupid-wrong here, this is my first time trying to install a Linux distro. I've poured through the installation guide and googled like a maniac, learning many things about Linux in the process but not the solution to the problem that I'm having. Is this thing not ready to install out-of-the-box?

If any more info is needed, I will try to get it and post it here.

Please help, the curiosity of Linux keeps me up at night.

-Thanks


-edit-
Well after tons of research, I've given up on this trash. The damn thing just doesn't want to install. One question...how can you people expect users to "migrate" (more like crawling through broken glass, in this case) if they can't even get the OS to install?

There's a reason why Windows is the most widely used OS. It actually works, and people can actually use it.

Linux = garbage. GG noobs, LOL.

Sorry you didn't get a reply to your question.

That error message is very common when people start compiling their own kernels and playing with bootloaders. It indicates that the kernel has loaded into memory, but cannot locate the system files it needs to continue. Often it is caused by a missing driver in the kernel or some configuration error.

I don't know why it would happen in this case - an installation disk from a reputable distribution really shouldn't have these problems. All I can think of:

Are you really booting from the DVD rather than from the result of some earlier, maybe partial or unsuccessful, installation attempt?

Maybe the installation process is confused by the presence of two optical drives. But you would really expect that sort of bug to have been eliminated long ago.

Bad DVD or flaky optical drive is a common cause of installation failure. Perhaps it could cause a kernel panic. Don't really know.

Have you tried another distribution? That would help isolate the problem either to a particular distro, or to your own hardware.