Hello!
I"ve just installed slackware 12, and I've got following problem: I can boot only using huge-smp (or just "huge") kernel. While booting "normal" ("non-huge") kernel, booting fails with:
1) "no filesystem could mount root partition" (if I'm trying to boot kernel without initrd" or
2) "no /sbin/init found on rootdev (or not mounted). Trouble ahead". (if I'm trying to use initrd.

I'm using ext3 for root partition. initrd was created using mkinitrd that comes with slackware 12 (mkinitrd -c -k 2.6.21.5-smp -m ext -f ext -r /dev/hdc3) but it looks like inintrd images doesn't work.

It looks like one of the solutions is to compile kernel with builtin ext3 support. But what are the ways to load "non-huge" kernel without recompiling it?

Thanks.

have you toggled /dev/hdc3 bootable?

Well it looks like your mkinitrd command is a bit faulty. Have a good read of the mkinitrd manual page, the /boot/README.initrd and also see mkinitrd --help.

I am going to give you two hints here, that may help you solve the problem:
1) Look at the file system you are specifying
2) Look at the kernel for which you are building your initrd

Good Luck

Yes, it boots with "huge" kernels (I've added a selection of kernel into /etc/lilo.conf, and only thing that boots is "huge" kernel.) I suppose that booting without initrd doesn't work because ext3 support is compiled as a module and isn't available at boot time. (I remember that Slackware 11 was somehow first mounting root partition as ext2 and then was remounting it as ext3).

Ok, thanks.

hint - ext3

Well, I'm not sure what was wrong before. Maybe I've made same misprint as in a first post (ext instead of ext3), or that was an initrd made from chrooted /mnt/ folder of slackware bootdisk. Anyway, everything works now ("mkinitrd -c -k 2.6.21.5-smp -m ext3 -f ext3 -r /dev/hdc3"). Problem solved, thanks for the help.

most likely the typo. Because you tried to load modules for an "ext" filesystem, instead of ext3. So your kernel is trying to load something, then tries to find your disk that has the rest of the modules/programs/etc, and screams in panic because it can't read the disk.

Glad it's working now

Don't you also need the "jbd" module for ext3 to work?

mkinitrd adds all modules required by this one automatically.