Compaq presario laptop+1.0.2=kernel panic on boot-up

[Scott]

Hello all,

I found myself an old Compaq Presario laptop at a garage sale the other day. It has a Pentium 233MHZ with 32MB of ram. I brought it home and tried to boot Puppy 1.0.2 on it and the boot-up procedure only gets so far down the list of unzipping stuff when I get the error message that reads:

<0>Kernel panic - not syncing: Attempted to kill init!

And then the computer just hangs right there frozen.

Any suggestions on what to do next would be apprecaited.


Many thanks
Scott

[slacker]

Try the newest version 1.0.3 of Puppy (or v1.0.1) -they both use the older 2.4 linux kernel.

Puppy 1.0.2 uses the newer 2.6 based kernel and you may have a problem on older hardware...gl

[danleff]

Two other issues. 32 mb of ram is probably a problem, since the video is also borrowing some RAM. So, if you have 32 total, you really have 24, as 8 is being used for video. Often some reported RAM is fixed on the system, so the total RAM available is actually less than what is reported.

The other thing is that older cdrom drives, especially in older lappys, don't like home burned cd disks. CDRW disks are a specific problem.

So, if the burned disk works in a newer system, but not in the lappy, you know that this is the problem.

Is the cd disk that you burned a cdrw or cd-r disk?

Sometimes this issue is overcome by burning a cd-r REALLY slow, say at 2X.