hi there

I am succesfully running Mandrake 10.1 on a desktop PC but when I try to installl it to my laptop it fails on boot up with the error message:

Kernel Panic: no init found. Try passing init= option to kernel

I'm a newbie to Linux, so don't know what to do!! I tried installing Mandrake 10.1 on two different laptops and got the same problem with each - yet the desktop is perfect.

Why the difference?

As I can't boot the laptop in Linux, (I can still use Windows XP) I can't pass an init= option to the kernel even if I knew how to.

Any ideas as to what to do, or can't I run Mandrake on my laptop? (Fedora Core 3 ran fine - but I find it difficult to work with)

Can I edit Linux files using XP?

Thanks
Adrian

It sounds to me like the lilo boot loader installation had an error. Boot up to the first installation disk and enter 'rescue'. Select The menu option to mount your partitions.

Then enter the command: chroot /mnt. After that enter 'bash -l' so that your normal logon script runs.

Hopefully you've gotten this far.

If you enter 'mount' without any parameters, you will get a display of the mounted partitions. You will want to compare this with the entries in /etc/lilo.conf. What probably happened is that lilo had a problem and so the loader wasn't installed. If you run it manually, it will print out a line for each section. If there is a problem, you will need to fix it before you boot up to linux. Execute the command /sbin/lilo to try to re-install Lilo.

Doing it from the console, you will get feedback if there are any problems.

Good Luck!

Thanks for replying

I didn't know that the Cd (DVD in my case) was a useful tool for rescuing installations - thanks.

Anyway, I did as you suggested and chose the menu option to mount my partitions....

A screen full of hardware and driver info shot past, but the final message was:

" Please wait, trying to find your root device...
Could not find your root device ;-( "


This is not quite what I expected. Any ideas what this means???

It does seem odd that the same mandrake DVD loaded lovely on my desktop PC but refuses to work on TWO different laptops!

Ho hum..
Adrian