Hi all, having a BIG problem, maybe someone can point me in the right direction.

I think it was a coincidence, but twice now I have tried to install extra RAM(chrissy pressy) but it did not work, I could boot the machine but it would not load the OS. I took the RAM back and swapped the OEM for Kingmax, paid the diff and tried again, still the same problem(btw, both sticks worked fine in a XP machine of a freinds). Basically the machine fires up, it gets to the lilo screen(so the MBR is fine as it was installed on the first sector of the hdd), I can select what I want from there, but when I select linux ( I am using Mandrake 10) it gets to the blue screen, normally it would give you the option of pressing ESC for verbose mode, but in this case it does not, it just stops and gives me a screen full of info about mount errors and kernal panics. I have copied this, it is at the end of this post.

I thought the hdd was about had it, but when I did a test with Powermax it showed fine(Maxtor 6Y060L0), I also checked it with Spinrite which also showed fine. It may just be a corrupted partition or something. In any case, I borrowed another hdd, installed M10 and set the faulty? hdd as slave, I could then access my original HOME directory, which I have copied across to this other hdd, I will burn the important stuff to cd shortly.

My question is this. How can I fix what seems to be a corrupted partition, will I have to do a reformat etc? For those people out there that can understand the screens that show up onloading, here is a word for word copy of what the screen says after the panic happens. Looking forward to some help in solving this problem.

A couple of questions regarding this info below.
a) Why should I report my BIOS info to the addy shown?
b) What are buckets, in the context shown?

Much appreciated
Asif

EISA: Probing BUS 0 at eisa0
NET: Registered protocol family 2
IP: routing cache hash table of 8192 buckets, 64kbytes
TCP: Hash tables configured (established 262144 bind 65536)
NET: Registered protocol family 1
BIOSEDD facility v0.13 2004-Mar-09, 1 devices found
Please report your BIOS at http://linux.dell.com/edd/results.html
Resume Machine: md: Autodetecting RAID arrays
md: autorun...
RAMDISK: Compressed image found at block 0
VFS: Mounted root (ext2 filesystem)
Mounted devfs on /dev
Red Hat nash version 3.5.18-mdk starting
loading jbd.ko module
Mounting /proc filesystem
Creating device files
Mounting sysfs
Creating root device
Mounting root filesystem
mount : error 6 mounting ext3 flags defaults
well, retying without the options flags
mount : error 6 mounting ext3
well, retying without any flag
mount: error 6 mounting ext3
pivotroot: pivot_root (/sysroot, /sysroot/initrd) failed : 2
Remounting devfs at correct place if necassary
mounted devfs on /dev
Freeing unused kernal memory : 272k freed
Kernal panic : No init found. Try passing init= option to kernal.
_

That is it, it stops at the cursor underscore and just hangs.

I have the same problem.
Lemme know if you find a solution.

Well, I have mine fixed but I do not know if it is a solution. I know what caused mine. It was alchohol I also missed out the main bit of information that could have generated a response.

I had removed a hdd(slave) and a dvd player so my drive characteristics had changed, so when I booted up I got a message from hard drake asking if I wanted to do something(which under the influence of booze I agreed to). This in fact turned out to be changing the drive letters around!!!!

So, of course when I tried to boot, it was looking for INIT which is in the boot sequence on the hdd with my OS on it. It was no longer there, DOH!

So, in my case I used a 2nd older hdd, installed mandrake and put the original drive in as slave, I then accessed my HOME folder and copied it across to the 2nd drive. Reinstalled OS on the original drive and copied what stuff I needed to keep back across. Sounds messy? Yep, no doubt, but as I did not know how to access the hard drake to point my boot loader in the right direction it was the only way I could think of and of course Ihad no idea that this was the problem at this stage.

My boot loader was LILO and installed in the MBR.

Hope that helps with your problem m8

Cheers
Asif