I just got a new hard drive and at first I wanted to install gentoo on it, but when I tried to format the third partition, I got a kernel panic. I thought there might be a scratch on the drive so I broke the third partition up into 2 different partitions and tried formatting each. Both of them caused a kernel panic on gentoo. I decided to try a slack 9 CD to see if it could format one. It was actually able to format both, so I decided to just install Slack, but when I got to the swap partition adding part of slack, I got a kernel panic. It said something about the interrupt handler, can't remember exactly, but if I need to I can find out. So, why didn't the format work on gentoo? and why did slack panic when it tried to make the swap?

The drive is a maxtor 10Gb. Not using Raid.

-Thanks in advance.

Did you try to put the HD switch in ' auto/cable select ' instead of ' slave ' or ' master '? What does your bios say about the HD, it is recognized fine, the size matches ?

It appears as though I get a kernel panic any time I try to format or mount the third partition on /dev/hda or IDE01 that's in gentoo anyway, in slack the error occurs when I run setup and try to setup swap partitions, although a manual mkswap works fine. Any ideas?

I found out what was wrong with this. It turns out it was bad RAM. I used a memory tester, but it was the microsoft memory tester, and apperantly it doesn't work . Anyway, the bad RAM caused some strange errors with every OS and distro I've tried, so if you're having any type of problem, I guess bad ram could always be something to check.