I have just installed my Linux Mandrake on a USB external hard disk (bootable). When I restarted the computer, LILO 22.3.2 loaded and a graphical screen poppep up. After choosing the linux option, the program loaded and text messages appeared. However, halfway through the system hangs and says: ... Creating root device Mounting root filesystem kmod: failed to exec /sbin/modprobe -s -k block-major-8, errno = 2 mount: error 6 mounting ext3 flags Mounted devfs on /dev Freeing unused kernel memory: 148 k freed Kernel panic: No init found. Try passing init= option to kernel. Can it be a problem with my external hard disk. I have looked for solutions in the Internet to no avail. Can someone please help?????!!

I'm unsure of the error, but why did you put it on an external harddrive. Its not something you are going to be able to walk around with and plug into a computer to use linux. Install it to the normal internal hard drive and use the external as a storage device that can then be taken to another computer and have the information taken off it. Keep it simple, don't make it harder.

Do you have the bootloader installed on the external hard drive ? Then it gets interesting, as it clearly means that your system supports booting off an external hard drive. If this is the case, you can ask the kernel to preload usb storage drivers before it mounts the root filesystem. Use the CD to rescue, go to the command prompt, and edit /etc/modules.conf You might add a line 'alias scsi-hostadaptor usb-storage' to this file. You now need to recreate your initrd image using mkinitrd. This you can learn easily from the man pages. But again, it is not easy to get this working correctly unless you have the patience, so use your internal hard drive unless you know what ur doing. Good luck!

Sorry, you said clearly that your drive was bootable. I didn't read properly. See this Google cache for more info: http://216.239.53.104/search?q=cache:-xa6GCHoEEkJ:www.redhat.com/archives/seawolf-list/2002-November/msg00007.html+seawolf+archives+usb+hard+drive+mkinitrd&hl=en&ie=UTF-8