Kernel panic

[Trilochan Padhi]

Hi there!  I'm a rank newbie attempting to load Mandrake/RH
on my system (an AMD K6/266 with Award BIOS).  I get past
partitioning, but while it is attempting to format the swap
space partition, I get the message

  Kernel panic:  Attempted to kill the idle task!
  In swapper task - not syncing

Help!  I don't know where to start looking for my problem.

Thanks