Gene,
At a guess, the first time you told it to mount a device that doesn't
exist. The second time, you asked it to mount your original
dos/windows partition as a linux root, of course it doesn't have the
/dev/ special files so init didn't know how to connect to the console.
I don't have readme.1st nor know where to find it to try to guess what
you are doing; I don't know what you used to make a filesystem on your
clean partition so you could unzip things into it, but let's assume for
now whoever wrote readme.1st knows what he's doing. Probably you need
only tell it to mount the partition you prepared for it and all will be
well.
It looks to me like you have an ide hd, which already has dos or
windows on it, so if you only made 1 clean new partition it would be
/dev/hda2. If you also made a swap partition, don't try to mount that.
Partitions are numbered in the order they occur in the partition table.
Where did you get /dev/sda4 from? An example? You have to adjust the
examples to the reality of what you are doing. Really, it's not
any harder than you make it. Don't panic.
HTH
Lawson
>< Microsoft free environment
This mail client runs on Wine. Your mileage may vary.
On Mon, 15 Feb 1999 23:51:32 -0800 (PST) gene hitz <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
writes:
> I wrote to the list a few weeks ago. I'm the newbie who wanted to
> know
> how to get started with Linux. I received many helpful responses from
> the group and finally decided to try the Slackware version. I
> downloaded the 35,663 Kb zipfile and unzipped it into a new clean
> partition and wound up with 15 directories containing 10,989 files. I
> tried following the readme.1st file unsuccessfully. In DOS, I tried
> "loadlin vmlinuz root=/dev/sda4 rw" and after several pages of
> installation I got the message, "vfs: cannot open root device 0804"
> and "kernel panic: vfs: unable to mount root fs on 0804", and the
> machine locked-up. When I next tried "loadlin vmlinuz root=/dev/hda1
> rw" it answered "unable to open initial console" What am I doing
> wrong
> and how do I proceed?
> Gene Hitz -- [EMAIL PROTECTED]
>
> _________________________________________________________
> DO YOU YAHOO!?
> Get your free @yahoo.com address at http://mail.yahoo.com
>
>
___________________________________________________________________
You don't need to buy Internet access to use free Internet e-mail.
Get completely free e-mail from Juno at http://www.juno.com/getjuno.html
or call Juno at (800) 654-JUNO [654-5866]
