Linux install kernel panic

[murph at vmark.com (Dan Murphy)]

A friend of mine (really!) is installing Linux onto his PC. He added a second 850MB drive and wants to put Linux onto a partition of that drive.

Using Slackware 2.3, he created a bootdisk and rootdisk diskettes by using RAWRITE. When he boots from the bootdisk, it boots for a while, then asks for a ramdisk (not a rootdisk). This is weird. If he skips over that by hitting enter, it asks for the rootdisk. When that is inserted, he gets a kernel panic saying it can't mount the root filesystem.

When I went did an install a while ago, I don't remember getting the prompt for a ramdisk, although I had to go thru some loops to handle EIDE.

We tried entering a bootparm saying:

ramdisk hdb=1654,16,63

but it still prompted for the ramdisk.


I'm wondering if it's his GSI EIDE disk controller, which controls his floppy, both HDD's, serial ports, etc. Any known problems with this controller? I browsed a slew of HOW-TO's and c.o.l.setup, but found nothing related to this card.

Any help?

Thanks.



Dan Murphy                 murph at vmark.com
Vmark Software             74260.3322 at compuserve.com
Westboro, MA