On Mon, Jun 04, 2001 at 10:24:56PM -0400, Margarete Hans wrote: :If you wonder why I don't use a rescue disk to boot: :I get a message that the disk is not bootable. :I tried redownloading the rescue disk files, tried more than 5 :different floppies, same message. :When I tried the compact version, linux booted fin, but stopped at the :kernel panic: VFS: unable to mount root fs on 03:02 :Seems somewhat weird - I don't know what to do anymore.
Can't help with loadlin (sorry), but I notice the kernel error you got from the compact floppy shows it's trying to mount /dev/hda2 as the root file system (major number 3, minor number 2). This may be what you eventually want, but at install time (the floppy disk way), you read in the root file system from a floppy disk because there may not even be a partition for root yet, much less all the files that are needed. I missed the model of this laptop, some have secrets and you should look at http://www.linux.org/hardware/laptop.html for a link to your specific model. For example old IBM thinkpads with a 2.88M floppy require you to pass floppy=thinkpad to the kernel, there's also some similar magic to use the sony pcmcia cdrom to install on one of the spiffy new vaios that don't have any removable media on board... -Jon