Kernal Panic

[Darryl Gibson <n2diy postoffice worldnet att net>]

Hello list,

While rummaging thru my parts box looking for a non plug n pray modem, I
found an 800meg hard drive, so I decided to dump the 500meg partial
install in favor of a full install of RH5.2

Things went fine for the first half of the install, but then I started
receiving messages to the effect that the /usr directory was full. My
linux book suggested a 350meg directory, but obviously that wasn't big
enough. So I aborted the install, allocated 500megs to the directory,
and tried again. Same result, though this time the same problem occured
3/4 of the way into the install. So I allocated 600megs to the
directory, re-installed, and that was successful, almost.

I rebooted the computer, 486/33 w/8megs of ram, and instead of getting
LILO, I get LI, displayed twice, on two seperate lines. So I tried the
boot disk I made with boot.img, before the install, and that takes me
back to the install program, with a boot prompt at the bottom. I type
linux at the prompt, things appear to go normally with hardware
detection, but then I get the message "Ramdisk: Compressed image found
at Block 0." And the system hangs.

So I tried the same procedure, but this time I enter RESCUE at the boot
prompt, and insert the Rescue disk, with similar results. Except now the
fatal message reads" Kernal Panic: VFS: unable to mount root fs on
03:05.

Then I tried the second boot disk, that I made at the end of the install
program, and it attempts to load linux, and that generates an error
message stating "Error 0x10," tries to reload linux with the same
result, looping between the two.

Also, hitting tab at the boot prompt doesn't give me the DOS option,
though I can access dos from a dos boot disk.

I'm not looking foward to another three hour install. And I was getting
some info from the Redhat and Google search engines, but two hours ago
the net came to a screaming halt, the 18:00 local time log jam?

Anyway, is there a quick way to correct this, fdisk /mbr? A partial
reload of RH? Or am I doomed to a complete re-install?

There is a dynamic disk overlay on the hard drive that survived fdisk
and format, do I need to low level format the drive? Linux did see the
full size of the drive, and the only other sw loaded on it is dos, so I
should be below the 1024 cylinder limit.?

TIA

Darryl