I installed Mandriva 2006 on a recently purchased Leveno (IBM) X41. Following the install the machine will not boot.

The X41 is similar to the X40, except that the hard drive is SATA. SInce I did not purchase the CDROM drive, I booted from a floppy and did a network install. There were no errors during the install; however, the packages were installed onto /dev/sdi5, so I specified this as the root in lilo. When I tried to reboot, I now get the error "kernel panic not syncing, try init=".

Does someone know how to fix this problem?

I think this is a problem with recent kernels. I did a Debian install on my X41 and it worked up until about kernel 2.6.12. After that I get the same error. Unfortunatley those earlier kernels don't work too well with the Thinkpad's drive (something about DMA not turning on).

I finally ended up installing Ubuntu Breezy on it. Everything works like a charm including suspend to ram. But, if you want to still with Mandriva then I would recommend stepping down to either an earlier 2.6 kernel or, worse case, 2.4.27.

Thank you.

Apparently the problem was associated with the usb floppy drive I was using to load the install program images. The problem was fiixed by writing the image all.img onto a jump drive and booting from it. The installation went well (but see below). To satisfy my curiosity, I returned to the floppy install. Apparently the install program saw the floppy as 8 separate devices, /dev/sda--/dev/sdh! The hard drive was then seen as /dev/sdi, which apparently was not seen at boot.

Unfortunately, on Mandrake 2006 suspend to ram and disk does not work (and it does not work for any of the other machines my colleagues use, including the IBM X41, T22, Averatec 3150 and an Omnibook 500).