kernel panic: can't find init
 

Hello- I have an interesting question. I have Mandrake 10.1 on my system and I dual boot using lilo. I also have windows Xp on my system as well. Everything worked great but then I discovered that the reason my cdrom drive hasn't been working correctly is because I had the wrong kind of IDE cable. I had on older one that didn't support the higher ATA of my cdrom. I bought some new IDE cable and installed them in my computer, but when I tried to but into linux it gets a kernel panic error and says that it can't find the init. I tried booting into failsafe and a couple of different ways but I got the same message. I booted into Windows and it thought my cdrom was a new device and said installing new hardware and installed it. Could the cable of somehow changed something? I hooked the cables back up exactly how the old ones came off and didn't change anything around. Any advice would be great. Thanks a lot :)

if your drive is setup for "cable select" just plugging the hard disk into different plugs(even if they're on the same cable) will change the order.

during bootup in lilo you can try to change the boot drive by adding an option "boot=/dev/hd?"
Where ? is "a" or "b" or "c" or "d" (probably same as the order as in the bios boot up screen)

Thanks for the advice. I just reinstalled Mandrake and it worked fine after that. Mandrake installs so fast, like 12 minutes, that it wasn't worth my time trying to mess with it. Thanks again
:)