Kernel Panic: VFS: Unable to mount root fs oa 16:40
 

here is the entire section where things looked like they started to go bad:

UMSDOS: msdos_read_super failed, mount aborted.
FAT: bogus logical sector size 9221
FAT: bogus logical sector size 9221
sh-2021: reiserfs_read_super: con not find reiserfs on ide1 (22,64)
Kernel Panic: VFS: Unable to mount root fs on 16:40

any ideas?

Yes. You formatted your '/' in Reiserfs, then installed 2.6, without making an initrd.

Boot cd1, then at the boot: prompt, follow the instruction printed on the screen to boot your box. Then look in '/boot' and read the README.initrd.

how do i open the README.initrd in the Console?

and everytime i reboot after installing it gets as far as saying boot to cd which there is no cd in the drive, the Bios just checks anyway, the it says L 99 99 99 99 99 99 for about 6 lines of the screen. sounds like a lilo problem but i have no idea how to fix it.

You need to run lilo again and update the bootloader to get rid of the 99 problem.

The easiest thing to do would be boot from the CD, at the boot prompt enter "bare.i root=/dev/hdXX noinitrd ro" where hdXX is your root partition (varies), and recompile your kernel and compile ReiserFS into the kernel instead of a module. That is, if your root FS is ReiserFS. After compiling and installing the kernel edit /etc/lilo.conf to where there is a bootable configuration for your new kernel and old one (you should be able to figure it out), and save it and run "lilo" in a shell.

That's the easiest way I can think of, I've never done the initrd thing though.