mount: error 6 mounting ext3
 

After succesfully installing mandrake 10 community on an external usb2 box (with an ibm 80gb ide hard disk) I tried rebooting and I received the following error:

mount: error 6 mounting ext3
pivotroot: pivot_root (/sysroot, /sysroot/initrd) failed:2
Remounting defs at correct place if necessary
Mounted defs on /dev
Freeing unused kerbel memory: 272k freed
Kernel panic: No init found. Try passing init=option to kernel

The motherboard bios supports booting from usb. Can anyone help?

sure, BIOS supports booting from USB but the Linux kernel must be configured with the USB drivers built-in, not as modules as is the current practice. Without that, the kernel will not be able to access the drive.

I don't have any USB HD, not sure if it's possible to format one of that with a non-vfat filesystem.

I though the linux kernel has built-in support for USB devices. No special drivers are required for this external box, but it does require usb2 drivers from the OS (atleast under windows). Is there anything I could do?

The Linux kernel has built-in modules, drivers compiled and linked against the kernel, or loadable modules, compiled separately from the kernel and dynamically loadable when needed.

At boot time, only the built-in modules are active, so the booting media and the root filesystem must be supported by built-in modules OR by dinamically loadable modules present in the initrd (initial ramdisk), if used. Normally, USB support is not present at these early stages of the booting process.

I don't know if MDK 10 installation handle that.

If this was the case, then how come installation was completed without any problems? Why USB support is active during installation and not after?