kernel panic
 

Hi, I'm trying to do a small (x-windowsless) install on an old dell (p1, 66 mHz, 128 RAM, and a 500 mb hard drive). It's got win95 on it now and the bios won't boot to the cd.

I got a boot disk from slackware using the bare.i image. I got the install disks (called root images?). I also got the basic package (a).

I made the boot disk. It fires up and seems to detect the right hardware (hard drive and cd).

It prompted me for the root disks (five of them). It took them happily (claiming that ext2 filesystem was found at block 0 - that's good right?) but then dumped a bunch of errors to the screen the last of which said kernel panic (which I thought was kind of funny). Those errors included, but were not limited to:
"VFS : Mounted root (ext2 filesystem)" - that's ok I think. Then,
"EXT2-fs error (device ramdisk(1,0)):ext2_check_page...." THen, "Kernel panic: No Init found. Try passing init= option to kernel."

Did I screw up the root? How do I pass init= to the kernel?

My plan had been to format the hard drive and then run setup. Thoughts on where this process has gone awry and how I may fix it are welcome.

Thanks!

I seem to recall having a similar problem myself. I think (thought) the bare and adaptec kernels were corrupted when I downloaded them though. Instead of reattempting I tried a another kernel image, the raid image I believe worked fine for me. It will still provide the support for the IDE devices in your machine. The Slack 8.1 uses the six disks now, the first is the kernel and the other five are the root file system image to mount as a RAM disk. If your system read the five disk set OK, then they are probably fine. Just use a different kernel disk.

BTW: LQ has a dedicated Slack forum here under Linux Distributions.