where do i begin?? problem after problem :(

[method]

I am totally new to redhat linux. I currently have this setup
Asus P4P800, 3.0ghz cpu, geforce 4, 2x 20gig hdd 1x 80gig hdd + 1 dvd burner, 512mb ram.

I have drive c (20gig) and drive e (80gig) as ntfs partitions.
Drive c is my winXP drive
drive e is my d/l drive

drive d is empty (20gig)

I tried to use vmware to create a virtual machine on drive D. I then tried to install redhat 9 onto this drive (was ntfs at the time) I installed all 3 cd's fine and when it came time to boot up, the system would hang inside vmware and crash my computer.

I wasn't sure if i was selecting the right hdd or whatever to install as the gui installer can't be used through vmware. So i tried again and it stalled during the boot up of redhat. I removed the vmware files.

When i restarted my computer i booted up with the redhat 9 cd 1 and continued to install from there. When it installed i got the error:
"Kernel panic: no init found. Try passing init = option to kernel"

I then booted into winXP and drive D was not visible. So i used the winXp cd setup from bootup and deleted the partitions it created on D drive. It then went on and copied windows files so i stopped that and then found i couldn't boot anything. I used the norton ghost recovery program to ghost my c image back to c: This worked fine.

After getting winXP up and running on c: and my d: clean and formatted to FAT32 i unplugged my e: and c: and installed linux onto the d: When it finished i got the same kernel panic error.

I tried searching on redhat.com and in google but the answers seem very mixed as to how to fix it and unclear to me as i am not familiar with all the /xxx/xxx commands.

Problem is i need this to boot up for uni.
I also am selecting NO grub loader in the setup as i was told its pointless if my Winxp is on NTFS and i will need to use the boot disk made in the setup to boot redhat.
Flame me if you wish if this is a newbie question but help me if you can.

Thank you.

[kkubasik]

No one here is gonna 'flame you' for a ligit question, this is a common error, i recently read a thread on how to fix it, and it involves changing your bios settings from auto to something, run a search under 'windows bios auto' and you should find a string like this. Personaly i dont dual boot my linux box, so i dont want to try to guide yo uthrough this considering i cannot test anythign myself.

[method]

only lets you have AUTO and disable. I tried it on both options and still get the same error.

[kkubasik]

Hmmm. Again, I can't say that i am the best for this as i have never encounted the error myself, but you might have to modify the bootloader so that it points differntly, hopfuly someone else will post here and help u out

[zeeone]

Sorry, I do not do dual booting anymore, but you might check

www.geocities.com/dt2pc

has something to do with dual booting, not sure if it covers using multi HDs, but mabe it will help.

[method]

s which was not selecting every package. It installed, and i installed grub loader which lets me boot to xp and linux. But there is 2 linux options?? Which one should i choose? One is linux up or something and the other one says smp or something i can't really remember.

Also i have no mouse in linux, its not detected. How to i re-configure it using keyboard shortcuts? IT was working fine in the installation and then i selected logitec mousman instead of the detected generic one.

Thanks

[kkubasik]

the smp is support for mulitiple processers/hyperthreading, try going back to the generic mouse, in some ditros you can turn off numlock and use the arrows on that part of teh keyboard to move mouse, or you could do it all in terminal you can access by pressing CTRL ALT F1.

[monkey8]

Are you moving the location of the drives when installling? You said you took out drives c and e, which doesn't actually say what they are. (example, windows put my 2 hd *after* my 3rd, who knows why, and this is even XP...)

So maybe you installed linux to /dev/hda then reput back in your drives, and now linux is /dev/hdb so that's why it may not find init.

If you tell it to use init 3, like it asks, will it boot?

[zeeone]

You may want to try a newer distro, your machine is maybe to new for RH9 to run on, this has been a noted problem.

[mayyash]

I have once installed linux under VMware, it was red hat 9, now i can run both windows and linux at the same time on the same machine...I remember facing such a problem about kernel panic, but don't remember what the solution was...but i am sure i had to read much in vmware support site.

I hope the following will help:
http://www.vmware.com/support/kb/end...p_sort_by=dflt

My machine is AMD XP 2400+, 512 MB Ram, 60 GB HDD, with Gefore 4, the virtual machine drive was on NTFS partition and no problems there. I am using VMWare Workstation 4.