Hey guys I have a Mandrake 9.1 system and I decided I wanted to try slack as well, So I repartitioned the drive to make room and installed slack to its own root,and usr partitions but shared the /boot/ partition so I could keep my already configured MDK lilo and use Slack as well. Instalation went fine and I went into Mandrake to configure lilo for slack. I found the new kernel image in /boot/ right where it belongs bout I could not find a slack initrd. All of the initrd images belong to Mandrake, therfore when I try using them with t he slack kernel I get a kernel panic. Does anyone know where I can get a slack initrd image from I used the standard Slack kernel if that helps.

Thanks,

DMBand8700

If my assumption is correct for the Mandarke system the initrd is to initialize a ramdisk. Slack would not use it nor want it. I also thought Mandrake used Grub for the boot loader. For the Slack boot partition specify ramdisk=0 for lilo.conf. I would not know what Grub would want. The parts I believe that would be critical are the kernel image, the root partition mounted read-only, and any append statements that you require. The job of the boot loader is to load the kernel image with the correct parameters for the root partition as read-only (unless reiserfs then I think it is read-write) with the desired append statements. For an example command line you could view /proc/cmdline, mine is below. Here root=302, is the device 3 major 2 minor; or hda2.

BOOT_IMAGE=Linux ro root=302 hdd=ide-scsi

If your kernel is booting and you are receiving an INIT error message and a kernel panic, it is because it did not find a mountable system partition as specified. Probably the root file system specification.

Perhaps it will help. If unable to resolve then I suggest installing lilo to the root partition of the Slack install to handle the Slack system. Then in the Mandy config, simply add an "other" boot section like for DOS to call the Slack partition. Then it should call the lilo boot loader to load the Slack system. I would not think you need to reinstall Slack for this. Boot the Slack install CD and at the boot prompt provide the "bare.i root=/dev/hdxx" as required. Then login and run the liloconfig script to rerun the lilo setup program again using the expert mode. After that you should be able to reboot and setup the Mandy boot loader to call it.