Ok I've had mandrake as a dual boot with XP on my main gaming machine, but it's getting annoying having to switch and i want to learn some various programming languages, so I just decided I'd put SuSE 9 onto my old k-6 450, 192mb ram, 12gb hdd. Currently the machine has a MSDN distro of win2k server beta, i dont really use it i just had it on there to mess around with.

To start out my SuSE install, I went to www.suse.com and read the install guide which is really simple and straight forward, after that I got the boot.iso and burned it onto a CD. Now comes the problem, I've booted to the CD, got into the option menu for install, typed in my install location ( I'm assuming this is where I type in the FTP address? ) I typed in the nearest one, all the way from ftp:// to /suse/9.0/ . I then hit enter, it brings up the dialog box that says 'Loading the Kernel' and quickly fills up the progress bar. Then it brings up a window, with a bar I'm assuming should be a progress bar? however it stops about 3 seconds in and dumps me into a shell, only I can't type anything and it's just telling me what it's done so far, the last line states:

Kernel panic: VFS: Unable to mount root fs on 03:03

If you want any of the lines above that I can give those too, I've asked everyone I know that could help me with this and we haven't gotten anywhere. I've tried doing a safe install, manual installation, just hitting enter w/o typing in an installation location, I've even tried partitioning it with partition magic 8 ( made 512mb swap, 100mb boot, 4gb /home and the rest for / ) all ext3 except the swap. I don't know if PM initialized the partitions or not as I wasn't paying attention to it after i set it to partition. I also tried booting up Live SuSE 9 and it gives the same problem however I can boot knoppix fine. All the hardware components are functioning without error, the CD drive is only 24x however that shouldn't cause a problem.

I'm at a total loss as to why it's doing this and what's causing it.