Well, I installed Salix (based on slackware 13.37) on my main drive. However within 5 minutes of booting I get a kernel panic. I downloaded the testing directory from slackware 13.37 with the 2.68.4 kernel and tried to install it. Now when I boot from my hard disk I can only boot into windows as when I choose Salix the kernel tests the BIOS data (which takes a while) successfully but bombs out straight after that due to not finding the root fs.

This is on a Dell 1558 laptop with specs:

Intel core i5
4GB RAM
ATI 5470 Radeon Mobility

My hard drive is partitioned like this:

/sda1 -> Dell setup
/sda2 -> recovery partition
/sda3 -> windows 7
/sda4 -> extended partition
/sda5 -> Salix root partition ‘/’
/sda6 -> Linux ‘/home’ partition
/sda7 -> Linux ‘/data’ partition
/sda8 -> Linux swap partition

sda5 to sda8 is logical partition in the extended partition. I ran mkinitrd as per the initrd.README file in the /boot directory. Can someone point me to some more noobish info of how to install a new kernel in slackware/salix?

Did you update lilo.conf and rerun lilo after doing the kernel update?

I've never run salix, so I don't know what the difference is between it and generic Slackware.

I can tell you that allend is dead-on: I kept on forgetting it a bunch of times tonight as I was fighting with a driver problem and kept having to nuke and re-install (bouncing between 32 and 64 bit and between 37.6 and 38.4).

Another thing is that I've never really liked initrd personally: it's perfect for a distro, but if you're like me and want to customize the kernel (mainly to put it on a diet and shrink it), it is far easier IMHO to compile in the drivers you need at boot time--or ALL the time--and modularize those that you only use occasionally. This tends to make things rock-stable at the cost of being specific to that machine only: good for your home machine, bad if you're managing a network of hundreds or thousands (unless they're all clones).

Mike

Do you have the the line:

initrd = /boot/initrd.gz

in your lilo.conf?

Also, are you confident that you gave mkinitrd the right options? If not, you may want to use the lovely script that installs with mkinitrd-it gives you an ncurses dialog to choose options based on your environment if passed the -i option.

mmm, coming to think of it I might not have updated lilo.conf. How can I fix it now? Would I have to re install from scratch?

Wow, mutiple replies between me replying just now. Thanks all, I did not know about the -i switch guess I will reinstall now.

Just for clarity, I am referring to the mkinitrd command generator script which, um, generates mkinitrd commands that you can copy and paste into a shell.

I can't quite remember where it installs to (possibly /usr/mkinitrd) but it should be easy to find. You can also get it here:

http://connie.slackware.com/~alien/tools/

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You most certainly do NOT have to re-install to fix this. You just need to boot the install CD, chroot into your root partition and run 'lilo', then reboot.