Thanks everyone!
Sorry if my previous posts weren't that well thought out, I am deffinitely new at this though starting to get a feel for where things are and what tools are available to me when I REALLY get myself into a mess, which incidently I mangaged to do in trying to troubleshoot this whole kernel panic thing...
Turns out my particular error was one referencing VFS and not being able to identify/mount 'root,' and after some research I came to see this was a combination of incorrect settings in my bootloader conf and fstab files. I needed to define the LABEL=/ option as my correct drive location of Linux, which happens to be hdb1...
Unfortunately for me I somehow managed to save a fat-fingered hb1, and after doing so overzealously for ALL my kernels (DUH!) I had successfully disabled myself from booting to ANYTHING!
* bows*
Fortunately it turns out Linux has a really handy recovery system available and built-in which allowed me to log in as root and attempt some changes, and after I figured out what was going wrong I went to open fstab to set the partitions to what they should be...
Which is when I got the message that /mnt/hdb1 was mounted read-only and that I couldn't change it. My first thought was chmod but that didn't seem to work either, so I booted back into Micro$oft and googled some stuff until I found this helpful command:
mount -n -o remount,rw /dev/hdb1
Presto, instant writable file system!
So I went ahead and made the changes. Incidentally, vi rocks as a text editor in such situations way over ed or other such one-liners, which proved a bit too tedious for me to manage with. (About five erroneous and redundant entries later...) With vi I get the whole file up on the screen and can simply hit “I” to enter insert-mode (which I am certain you all have discovered long ago) and change whatever I have to. Pretty cool!
Anyway that solved the kernel panic, though my problem now is that for some reason my USB intelli-scroll mouse won't reccognize no matter what I do. I even went so far as to compare the settings in my rebuilt kernel .config and the one that works currently from Redhat and can't see anything I am missing. Only thing I can think at this point is that there is some symbolic link I am missing or some file that has configuration options for modules and such I am yet to discover...
Still woring at it, just wanted to update this thread I started so you all didn't think I was just a loser trying to take the easy way out! I love these forums, as no matter what questions I have most of the answers seem available if one looks, and I certainly am not above asking or doing some work.
Considering what the “gurus” must go through, it seems the least I could do as far as consideration goes, though I imagine like any art they would consider it more play then work... (Up to about the 15,000th line of code I bet! You can't fool me, you are all still human! Right?)
DrOzz, minus a few steps I think I have been following a similar proceedure as you have outlined. I did a couple things manually via graphical explorers and such, however had been using xconfig and making the vmlinuz-xxx and xxx.img files ok. I hadn't used the symlink thing, so I'll try that next.
Thanks again everyone for an excelent board and resource for the community.
--James
