Dear All,

I'm trying to perform a harddisk installation of NLD 9.
I've copied all NLD cd's to a fat32 partition with Freedos on it.
When trying to start loadlin I get the following error and the system halts
:
RAMDISK: Compressed image found at block 0
invalid compressed format (err=2)
VFA: Cannot open root device "[NULL]" or unknown-block(8,3)
Please append a correct "root=" boot option
Kernel panic: VFS: Unable to mount root fs on unknown-block(8,3)

I'm using loadlin version 1.6c which is inlcuded on the first cd of NLD

I've tried the following commands, without success, to start loadlin :
LOADLIN DOSUTILSLINUX INITRD=DOSUTILSINITRD ramdisk_size=65536
LOADLIN dosutilslinux initrd=dosutilsinitrd init=/linuxrc
LOADLIN dosutilslinux initrd=dosutilsinitrd init=/linuxrc
root=/dev/ram0

Can anyone help me out please ?

It appears you're trying to load a kernel called
"LINUX" which exists under DOSUTILS.  I've never
seen that particular file heirarchy used for loadlin.

It's been many years since I used loadlin, so I go
to ../loadlin/doc/manual.txt (v.1.6, ca. '96) and the
syntax there is somewhat different than what you're
using.  I don't know if loadlin has really changed
that much over the years from v.1.6 to v.1.6.c...

Have you already read all the documentation in
/loadlin/doc/quicksta.rt | manual.txt ?

The quickstart gives this example for what you seem
to be trying to do:

loadlin c:zimage root=/dev/ram rw initrd=c:rootdsk.gz

I didn't use the ram disk, so I did a linux.bat which
looked like this:

smartdrv /C
c:loadlinloadlin  c:loadlinlinuz-2.214  root=/dev/hda7  ro  vga=3