hello everybody, i am new here

my english isnt good so forgive me

my problem is about kernel panic. i have a seagate 200 GB SATA hdd, when i try to install the debian 3.1, after the pre installation, i mean debian install the base elements and then restart, grub loader starts debian but while debian attepmt to load i have token this error

pivot_root: No such file or directory or directory
/dev/console No such file or directory or directory
kernel panic: attepmted to kill init

or something like that.. what should i do, what is the problem...
thanks everybody

isn't there anybody knows??? i cant install it and this drives me crazy

I've just had what might have been a similar problem.

I don't think most Linux kernels have SATA support built-in by default. You can load it as a module later, but by then it's too late if your root partition is on a SATA disk.

You may need to recompile your kernel with support for your SATA controller (check the documentation for whatever board it plugs into - usually the motherboard). Mine's "NVIDIA SATA support", because I have SATA on my mobo with an nForce3 chipset.

I can't help you much further with the whole recompiling your kernel thing, because I don't really know anything about Debian. I've just done a very educational Gentoo install, and there was a fine ncurses-based utility called menuconfig that helps you - if you can get a version of that up and running, you'll just need to find the SATA section and enable the drivers for your hardware.

If it's anything like the Gentoo version, you DON'T want the 'SATA Support' that's along with all of the IDE stuff - this is deprecated, and clashes with the newer version.

This newer version lives inside the SCSI Support section of Device Drivers. Look under 'SCSI low-level drivers'.

thank you very much for answer, my chipset is nforce3 too, it is a bit interesting i think because i can edit my partitions (debian sees the hdd) but after restart it doesnt work.. let me search a bit.

I am facing the same error after installing debian sarge on the SATA disk. Did you resolved the problem?

I had a problem where my /boot/grub/menu.lst file had /dev/hda? instead of /dev/sda? in the kernel line for booting like it should be. If your having the same problem then you can either boot with a Knoppix live CD and mount the / partition then edit the menu.lst file to correct it or use something like this after hitting the c key when you get to the grub splash screen to get to the grub command prompt.

You would hit the enter key after each of the commands above being typed in. The first line tells grub that the / filesystem is on the first HD in the system (hd0) on the second partition (,1) now the partition part can be problematic depending on whether there are primary or an extended partition containing logical drives the number can change you would just use one less that the partition number itself eg. /dev/sda5 would be ,4 or /dev/sda4 would be ,3. The second line boots the default kernel on the root partition the =/dev/sda2 would be changed to the actual partition used during install, the third line tells grub to boot with the information you have given it. Once booted edit the menu.lst to correct the problem with the hda instead of sda then I would reboot to make sure grub works properly.