Mandrake on Dell Latitude. Kernel Panic when trying to install on external USB drive
 

Hi all,

I have a new Dell Latitude D800 with an internal and external HDD. The Internal drive has XP and I want the external drive (USB) to boot into Mandrake (9 or 9.1, tried both).

After I install Mandrake the machine reboots and displays the following error:

Kmod: failed to exec /sbin//modprobe -s -k block-major-8, errorno = 2

mount: error 6 mounting ext3 flags freeing unused kernel memory: 136k freed

kernel panic: No init found. Try passing init=option to kernel.

WHAT THE HELL DOES THAT MEAN ??????

After google searches I have read some problems with Linux on USB devices, but nothing directly useful.

Any help would be great as I am not to whiz with Linux. I need simple instructions please. Any boot up commands I can use or anything like that ?

Thanks guys (and maybe gals)

Jon

The thing about external usb drives at boot is that it won't load the drivers until the os is actually booting itself. You could check you bios to see if it allows you to boot from a usb device. Also do you have a floppy drive?

Booting from USB drive.
 

This is from a post from Google

"You'll need to do this using a boot floppy (at least until manufacturers start adding USB support for boot devices in the BIOS). According to posts I've seen on Google groups, Red Hat's installer as of v8.0 handles this pretty well. It will install to a USB hard drive and create a boot floppy for you to use.

If the laptop has a cd drive and you just want to get Linux up and running, there is always Knoppix."

Robna24,
How aure are you about Red Hat 8.0 fixing the problem with the USB booting? I installed 7.3... because I had the CDs and used the option to crete and boot from floppy and had the same issue. If you're sure about 8.0 and up fixing the issue I'll reinstall but if you're not real sure please let me know. I really need the luxury of dual booting from a USB device and I'd rather not add a boot partition to the c:\ drive. I was hoping to completely seperate the XP and RH. What do you or anyone else for that matter think?

Thanks,

ChrisP

P.S. I am so much the newbie!

JonBoy,
Did you ever find a resolution?

ChrisP

USB Boot
 

Hi ChrisP,

Not exactly solved it. The Dell is a really smart piece of kit. It has in internal HDD, a hot swap internal drive bay, and you can get an external caddy (USB). The best bit is if you it F12 when the machine boots it gives you a one time boot menu, and you can say for this boot only I want to boot from external USB or internal hot swap, external CD etc. Very useful.

Mandrake would not boot when the HDD was in the external caddy. It does start to though. I get the Lilo menu (which is loaded from the external HD), and it does start loading. It is after about 5 - 10 secs I get the error. But being complete shite on Linix I dont have the skill to work around this, so my solution was...

Have internal HDD with XP. Have second disk and plug it into internal media bay, and put my CD in the external caddy. This is not really what I wanted, as I wanted internal XP, internal CD and External HD in caddy as I have two other drives and wanted one as Mandrake and one as win2k server. Anyway, after all the waffle mandrake boots fine in the internal Media bay and I can boot between the two drives using the F12 bios menu.

That was the long answer. Short answer is...... no.

Hope you get some success !!

Jon