slack 11 on dell E1505/6400
 

Hello all, I recently got a Dell E1505 laptop and decided to do a dual boot off of it. I was able to get slackware installed (DVD) ok and running with the 2.4 kernel, however im not a fan of the 2.4 kernel so I decided to try the "easy" installation kernel packages that they give you in the testing dir of the DVD. The system would start, but give me a kernel panic during boot. I figured it was the SATA device not working since that is what it was on my other system. I booted the system off the DVD and decided I would just get the latest kernel from kernel.org and config it by hand. I went through the configuration and under the SCSI section I went ahed and told it to install all the sata devices they had since I don't know what SATA controller is in the laptop. After compiling the kernel and running lilo im still getting the same kernel panic message. Anyone have any ideas?

The laptop has the following:

Intel Core 2 Duo T7200 cpu
1Gb mem
120Gb Western Digital sata hdd
256mb Nvidia 7300
sxga+ 1680x1050 disp
dell wireless 1390 802.11b/g

It might help if you posted your exact error message ...

Most of the time a kernel panic is because the root filesystem is
not built into the kernel, but a module; and therefore requires an
initial ramdisk image to load that module.

To find out what sata module you need, just issue "lspci" and see
what chipset your motherboard uses. The particular SATA drive is
of no consequence ... it's the controller chipset. This is mine:

I am pretty sure it is the sata controller that isn't setup right because the kernel panic is the same one I was getting on my server when I was setting it up W/Slackware 10.2. I may look into the initrd, it may not be running correctly. I know the "brand" of drive has nothing to do with it. I will try the lscpci command and see what it returns. I will also try and post the dmesg.