anybody got any idea what this means?:
The kernel which is so distressed is the linux 2.0 kernel from BasicLinux 1.7 (which is based on Slackware 3.5). There's three ways to load BasicLinux, you can run it from true DOS mode, where it uses loadlin to kill DOS and runs from RAM, you can install it to your hard drive, or you can use their script to make 2 custom DOS bootdisks which start to load DOS and then run loadlin to boot BasicLinux. This last method is the one i am currently using, to get a feel for this linux before my new (actually an old pentium 75Mhz) laptop arrives, which will be BasicLinux's ultimate destination.
Anyway, i eventually got the WinME crippled version of DOS to make me the bootdisks (which involves quite a bit of trial and error and the deletion by hand of some of the less necessary DOS files off the boot disks at a crucial moment) (WinME is the only version of windows i have), only to find that DOS loads from the bootdisk, loadlin executes, the kernel starts booting up for 50 or 60 lines, then it deposits the above message onscreen as the last two lines of its output and hangs.

Interestingly it loads into BasicLinux no problem at all on my mate's Compaq P866 15E desktop machine, but when i try it using the same floppies on the laptop (with SiS chipset) i get the aforementioned error.
Any idea what's going on?

thanks in advance...

edit - actually, it looks (from what google told me) like this is an error that has something to do with not having drivers, or kernel support or something like this, for the type of disk or filesystem that i am trying to use. This is kind of odd to me since this distro of linux loads entirely off the FAT formatted floppies directly into 4MB of RAM, with NO disk access whatsoever. so what's the problem? weird...

I will go out on a limb here, but from the 2 lines you have given it seems the kernel sees the root fs floppy as being based on hpfs (OS/2 format). So first, make sure both floppies (I am assuming you have 2 -- kernel+root fs) file system support are in par with one another. If your kernel boots without having support for hpfs (for example), and you insert a floppy which is detected as having hpfs (or any other unsupported fs on your kernel), then it will barf with a message like the one you gave earlier.

Still, I am curious as to why the kernel sees the format as OS/2 format. . . Maybe it is a BIOS setting, where I have seen some machines (a while back) let you select between Windows and OS/2 for O.S. optimization (from my recolections). Check your machine's BIOS settings as well.

GL

thank you very much for your thoughts! I posted this in another forum too and got a similar answer, however the guy there suggested it was something to do with me having made the DOS bootdisks in winME.
I downloaded an image of MSDOS 5.0 bootdisk and made it using dd in linux, and i will test out how that works instead of using winME ones, which i know are not proper DOS, even by microsoft's standards.

Once more, thank you, i'll post again once i know how well it is working...

odd that it works on one computer and not the other though...
as it happens, it does load the contents of both floppies into memory (and they are both FAT) and the barf happens when it tries to boot the system.

ok, update: i downloaded a zipped image of a DOS 5.0 bootdisk from a link i found at bootdisk.com, i made the bootdisk using dd, and then i rebooted to WinME DOS (since DOS 5.0 doesn't recognise my FAT32 partition, or my ext3 partition) and used the basiclinux make_fd script to make the two floppies, using the MSDOS 5.0 floppy as the base.

Hey presto it works fine. Not sure why, but i think it might be something to do with winME not doing 100% proper FAT16 (or is it FAT12 for floppies?) filesystems. i don't know much about it but anyway, it now works, and all i did was change DOS versions.

thanks very much for all help and advice.