I was running my computer (it has an ASUS A7N8X mobo, an AMD Athlon XP 3000+ Barton Core, an nVidia GeForce FX 5500 video card, and I had a 160 GB Western Digital 7200 Caviar SE Hard Drive) and it's been giving me issues over the past two weeks. Finally my Windows XP SP2 installation crapped out and completely died. Apparently it trashed the MBR when it went, too. I was worried that my hard drive had just up and died, but I keep seeing people on the internet with similar stories to mine lately.

Anyway, I tried to install Ubuntu 7.04, the only Linux Distro I had a CD Of sitting around, in an attempt to salvage my computer. Well, it runs just great from the Live CD... But when I go to the install, it installs completely (hangs for a good bit in the language pack department on install though), but then I go for the first boot and I get a kernel panic.

I believe the error is:

Kernel panic: sync failed - attempted to kill init.

But I may be wrong.

I don't want to buy a new hard drive if I absolutely don't have to, so I was wondering if anybody knew any way to get around this or if anybody else had a similar problem? I'm going to try the Western Digital utility to write zeroes to the drive so that I can get it back as close as possible to it's original condition, and then try to install Ubuntu on it again and pray that it works.

Any ideas on what my problem may be would be great.

I would try using the Ultimate Boot CD to scan your drive for errors before proceeding. It should tell you if the drive is failing or not.

It sounds as if you don't have your / (root) filesystem setup properly. Either it's wrong in /etc/fstab or you don't have support in your kernel. Before you write the drive to zeroes, test it (advanced test, not 90-second test) to make sure there are no bad sectors.

When the mbr vaporizes, you can always re-install the windows boot loader by starting with the win install/recovery cd, going into the recovery console and typing 'fixmbr'. Of course, installing linux is always the better option

I had the hang on the language selection in an early alpha of feisty. Looks like its still a problem on some pc's. If the harddisk check doesn't return any errors you can try installing ubuntu with the alternate-install cd. It won't boot into the live system, and the installer is overall less prone to errors.
You might want to perform a memcheck too.

I guess I have some work ahead of me. But yes, I will try to make sure the disc is not physically damaged and then scan for bad sectors and then perform a memtest. If that clears, then I will see what I can do.