Uh oh! What have I done?! ...kernel panic?!?
 

Hi all. I really hope there is an easy fix for this...

I am dual booting with Mandrake 8.2 and Win98, I was in Win98 playing Unreal Tournament and it was a tad choppy so when I was done I figured I would scandisk and defrag. Well when I tried to boot into Linux after that I get this error on bootup:

mount: error 22 mounting ext3 flags Freeing unused kernel memory: 260k freed
kernel panic: No init found, Try passing init= option to kernel.

Now I'm a newbie and I really have no idea what that error means. Does anybody have any clue on how to fix this? I can boot into Windows still...

Thank you all for your help!

might want to do a search on the site here, maybe on panic or kernel panic as this is asked and answered all the time.
most likely it couldn't have been caused by the defrag and scandisk.. check out the other threads though, good info out there on this type of problem.

Well, I'm pretty sure that my partition got corrupted somehow, so I deleted it (I'm not sure if 'deleted' is the right word, anyway...) and reinstalled Linux. I searched these forums and the rest of the internet ;) but couldn't find something that would help me clear my prob. Hopefully it doesn't happen again...