Sad Penguin

Schlimmbesserung (German): the act of fouling things up in the process of trying to make them better.

Thanks to those of you who have left comments on my previous posts, below. Your suggestions are much appreciated, and leave me feeling slightly guilty that I've now managed to make them a bit moot... but hopefully most of the tips will port across to whatever I end up doing next. I'm not quite at the stage of taking Thomas' advice and taking a hammer to the blasted thing! :-)

But that still leaves the current... problem.

Having done some digging around on Linux Format's website, it became apparent that there's a tendency for the Mandrake cover-disc only to part-install on machines with low RAM. This is clearly what had happened to me, so rather than continuing to bash my head against a wall I decided to try to start from scratch and re-install.

In the course of this, the Mandrake installation program (text-only mode, which worked OK last time) started to format my hard drive - and then promptly fell over.

I tried again - got the opening splash menu screen - chose text install - but as the kernel started up, but before the installation program started, I got a message something along the lines of:

Kernel panic: Unable to mount fs on unknown block (1,3)

(That might have "been Kernel panic: VFS:" etc - I was too knackered to pay much attention by that stage. I'd experienced a similar message when I tried to install SuSE 9.1 last week (but that's another story), but I'm pretty sure that both times it was due to lack of memory.

When I rebooted again, without the CD, it took me through to GRUB.

It goes without saying, I'm afraid, that I haven't done anything sensible like prepare boot floppies or a bootable floppy version of fdisk. If you thought I might have done that, you'd be mistaking me for someone who had a clue. :-)

Having given this more thought since my slightly panic-stricken email to my Jedi Master, and also read the comments people have made to my previous posts, I'm already minded to try a distro that is more suitable for a low-spec machine. Daniel suggested Slackware, someone else has mentioned Debian. Any comments on these?

And is it likely that either of these distros will be able to circumvent the Misery and Ruination which I have brought to the previous peaceable kingdom of my hard drive?