RH9 kernel panic

One box I 'manage' [help the owner out with] has WinXP and RH 9.0 installed on the same HDD, using BootMagic as a boot loader. Everything went great for a while [some 3-4 boots] but now when trying to boot in Lin I get a "Preparing machine to boot Linux" message after BootMagic and it hangs. With the bootdisk, I get a kernel panic [some stuff about failing to mount /proc as I recall]. Theory goes, I wonder if Norton System Works may have something to do with it [being that both OSes are in the same HDD]. Maybe it thought the partition is corrupt or something... anybody any ideas? If there are any informations needed, please let me know.

What boot loader do you use? Or is BootMagic a BootLoader?

Perhaps you should use LILO or GRUB for your boot loader, and make sure that your kernel is configured properly.

Kernel Panics on boot are usually a) problem with the root filesystem, or b) problem with RAM.

Try booting miniroot (rescue floppy) and see if you can mount and fsck your root slice on the disk. (e.g.
/dev/hdb3). Several good utilities can be found at http://www.kernel.org/pub

Best of luck

-- spurious