help re Mandrake

["ruthneil" <nospam [at] ruthneil.force9.co.uk>]

for attention of Alex Hudson on advice from Richard

I purchased The Complete Linux Operating System 6.0 by Mandrake wih
special versions of Partition Magic and Boot Magic to install on my
Dell PC.

The Dell is a XPS600 with the following spec 256MB RAM
20GB Maxtor 92048D8 ATA HD partitioned as C D E F  Having followed
the installation procedure as best I can for partitioning the disk
to accept Linux, using both the Linux version of Partiation Magic and
also using my own copy of the full Partition Magic I have the
following problem.

When booting to Linux I get the following messages on screen after which the
system locks and I have to hard boot back to Windows.

"Uhhuh. NMI received. Dazed and confused, but trying to continue. You
probably have a hardware problem with your RAM chips."
"Partition check hda:hda1 hda2<hda5 hda6 hda7> hda3 UFS
Cannot open root device 08:21
Kernel panic: VFS:Unable to mount root fs on 08:21"

I contacted Mandrake who I can say were not the most
helpful only saying that I should check the ram chips and nothing
else so I have my doubts that they have ever come across the problem
before.  I have checked the RAM with the Dell diagnostic disk
supplied and also removed and re-seated the chips with the aid of
Dell Support but still the error message is there.  If there is
anyone who can assist me I would be most grateful or is the best bet
to try another version on Linux such as SuSE.

Neil Plummer

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