Hello everyone! :-D I hope this is the last thread about me trying to install Linux on this old machine... :-( Well... I booted off a DOS floppy (Win98, no ramdrive), formatted C: drive, and then I ran the linux.bat that is found on the /boot/dos/ folder in the Slax CD, and I typed these options when prompted: r:boot\vmlinuz initrd=r:boot\initrd.gz Then, the long list of Linux commands started scrolling down my screen... I felt relieved, until it stopped and I got this: VFS: Cannot open root device "<NULL>" or unknown-block(8,3) Please append a correct "root=" boot option Kernel panic - not syncing: VFS: Unable to mount root fs on unknown-block(8,3) Anyone know what the problem is? Thanks! ;-) http://sulfurmidis.com/sulfursoft http://tsfc.ath.cx ftp://tsfc.ath.cx hotline://tsfc.ath.cx If I connect my microwave to my PC, will I be able to download food?

Hold on a minute... I tried the exact same process on Virtual PC and I got the exact same error, with the same numbers and everything... :-| http://sulfurmidis.com/sulfursoft http://tsfc.ath.cx ftp://tsfc.ath.cx hotline://tsfc.ath.cx If I connect my microwave to my PC, will I be able to download food?

dev/null is needed for just about everything in linux if dev/null is fried you will need to repair its permissions try taking the cd to a linux box and chmod the dev/null so you have full permisions

Hmm? It's a bootable CD, I can't do that... Shouldn't it work out of the box? :-( Thanks! ;-) http://sulfurmidis.com/sulfursoft http://tsfc.ath.cx ftp://tsfc.ath.cx hotline://tsfc.ath.cx If I connect my microwave to my PC, will I be able to download food?

Doesn't look like a /dev/null problem... *are* there even /dev/null problems? It's not a real thing.. just a figment of the kernel's imagination. <NULL> does not mean /dev/null... it means that it doesn't know what device you intend to use as the root device. When you boot linux, you must specify what device you intend to use as the root. I don't know the details of what you're doing, but if you want to use the cd drive you'll want to add "root=/dev/hd?" to the end of your vmlinuz command thing. Obviously replace the ? with the correct letter that represents your cdrom drive. It's most likely "b" or "c". Again, I'm not sure what exactly you're doing, so I don't want to lead you astray, but you're getting that error because you didn't specify what device or partition or anything that you want to use as the root partition when booting. Since you're booting from a liveCD, you probably want to give it "root=/dev/hdc" or similar. Hope that helps!

Well... I'm trying to start up with this command: loadlin r:boot\vmlinuz root=/dev/ram0 rw initrd=r:boot\initrd.gz init=linuxrc load_ramdisk=1 prompt_ramdisk=0 ramdisk_size=9999 max_loop=255 I tried hdc also, since, while it's showing me the messages, it says hdc is the ATAPI DVD-ROM drive (Virtual PC's drive), but it says... Blah, look at the last lines I get: -------------------------- hda: max request size: 128KiB hda: 33554304 sectors (17179 MB) w/64KiB Cache, CHS=33288/16/63, DMA hda: cache flushes not supported hda: hda1 hdc: ATAPI DVD-ROM drive, 128kB Cache, DMA Uniform CD-ROM driver Revision: 3.20 ide-floppy driver 0.99.newide usbmon: debugs is not available usbcore: registered new driver hiddev usbcore: registered new driver usbhid drivers/usb/input/hid-core.c: v2.01:USB HID core driver mice: PS/2 mouse device common for all mice NET: Registered protocol family 2 input: AT Translated Set 2 keyboard on isa0060/serio0 IP: routing cache hash table of 512 buckets, 4Kbytes TCP established hash table entries: 512 (order: 0, 4096 bytes) TCP bind hash table entries: 512 (order: 0, 4096 bytes) TCP: Hash tables configured (established 512 bind 512) Initializing IPsec netlink socket NET: Registered protocol family 1 NET: Registered protocol family 17 VFS: Cannot open root device "hdc" or unknown-block(22,0) Please append a correct "root=" boot option Kernel panic - not syncing: VFS: Unable to mount root fs on unknown-block(22,0) -------------------------- That's the whole thing... What's wrong with it? Thanks very much! ;-) http://sulfurmidis.com/sulfursoft http://tsfc.ath.cx ftp://tsfc.ath.cx hotline://tsfc.ath.cx If I connect my microwave to my PC, will I be able to download food?

Hmm interesting... it can't use hdc as root. I wonder why not? I don't have much experience with mucking around with boot CD's. is there a reason you're not booting directly from the cd?