Hi,
I am an admitted newbie. I had tried putting on a Mandrake 10.0 version ithat i downloaded off the net. Things did not seem right...so I went to the Mandriva site and saw they recommended dl'ing 10.1 via bit torrent. Done.
When I went to reinstall I had a variety of probelms. I used fdisk to remove all partitions. Restared the computer with NO disk in the drive...NO floppy.
I STILL got a linux screen come up.
I went ahead..put the 10.1 disk 1 into the cd drive. It won't load. After going through the partitioning and selecting packages. (I leave it at default.)
I get a blue screen. The last lines read:

VFS: Mounted root (ext2 filesystem) readonly.
Mounted devfs on /dev
Freeing unused kernel memory: 272k freed
Kernel panic: No init found. Try passing init=option to kernel.


And that is where it stops.
I am running a piii 750 with 512 megs of ram.
12gb hard drive.

Any help, suggestion or offers to buy a boat anchor or greatfully recieved.
Stashmann

I'm a little confused by your post. Did you boot your system with the install cd?

Can you provide some details about your system? This would make it a lot easy to get an idea of what's going on that simply guessing.

Hmm the mandrake install is one of the easiest. Did you let it do automatic partitioning for you. I think you getting that error because the kernel cant find your root partition. I have two suggestions. First reinstall choose your own partitions. Some people have a small boot partition but what I do is just choose one big / partition and swap. Secord download knoppix live cd just to get the fill of linux. if you like it you can install it to your hardrive and you could even use it to fix your mandrake install.

I am booting with the CD.
My system is a PIII 750 MHZ
512MB ram
Creative CD Drive
Network Card
D-Link Router
12gb hard drive

I had it up and running on the internet with v10.0 of Mandrake.
According to my "buddies" I was better off dling v10.1 and reinstalling. I told it to do a complete format the same as when I put in the 10.0 version.

Now nothing works. I fdisked using the win98 boot disk and removed all partitions
When I did the first install after that it put on two hard drives.
hda0 and hda6 (near as i can figure out) each taking half the hard drive.
I am puzzled why I get the linux screen even after doing the format. Is there a better disk to clean the hard drive with than fdisk?
Linux will NOT beat me!!! (said with more confidence than i feel)

An addendum:
I booted from the CD. Told it to manually partition. In the partition window I told it to clear all partitions and then autoselect. It then asked me to select the packages I want.
I did that...then when I clicked ok i get the following errr:

An error occurred
basesytem package not selected


I'm so confused.

Thanks for the help

Stashmann

the base it the first thing installed so you need to chose it. I have not installed mandrake in awhile. chose the base and kde an any other group of packages you might use or follow my above suggeston.

the mbr on the drive still contains the bootloader pointing towards the original install.even if you remove the partitions the bootloader remains in place untill it is over written.

I swapped out the CD player....works like a charm...
Stashmann 1 - Linux 299

A long way to go..but one step at a time.

Stashmann