Not staying installed correctly... (kinda long)

Hi folks,

  Got a DVD of 13.37 Friday (Thanks, Rich!!) about noon and proceeded to install it on my 
second hdd until about 11PM that night (minus maybe two hours in between for lunch and 
whatever).

  Here's basically what happens every time I install:

First off, I startx works for about 10 seconds, whether root or user then drops back to 
the console (or whatever it's called). This happens whether I install the whole works or 
do an install where I can pick all the packages I want and don't want.

If I want 'startx' to work (I always install kde to use btw), after I do the first reboot 
after the installation, I install the nvidia .sh that I have in my opensuse hdd (I was 
able to boot back into my opensuse hdd and open a dolphin file manager in root mode and 
copied a slew of stuff over to the /home partition of the Slackware hdd). Once that's 
installed, I can then switch to user and 'startx' and I'm in kde.

Everything works fine, no hiccups, burps, nothing going wrong until I need to go back to 
my opensuse for whatever reason and then as soon as I try to copy something from the 
opensuse hdd to the /home of the Slackware hdd, it can't do it. Dolphin shows a small 
message at the bottom about 'mount: mount point swap does not exist' on the Slackware hdd.

Sooo...I log out of opensuse and boot into Slackware hdd to see what's going on and I get 
a kernel panic. It's this last part that happens, every, single time I log out of 
Slackware and then try to log back in.:

<skip a whole bunch of bootup stuff>
kernel panic - not syncing: no init found. Try passing init= option to kernel

And then maybe three or four lines after that just some gobbledy-gook and it freezes up 
hard.

I've tried using 'hugesmp.s root=/dev/sda2 rdinit= ro' but it does nothing at all. I end 
up re-doing the 'setup', formatting / and leaving /home unformatted and installing 
everything again.

So, why is my 'swap' going missing? Why is my 'init' going missing? Anyone have any idea 
at all what's happening and why? (I'll do another install (this makes 18 hours total now 
at this, heh) after/if anyone has any ideas and wants to see any particular files or 
anything and make copies and put them in my /home partition where I can still see 
everything there from the opensuse hdd).

  Thanks for any help with this,

  John


PS,

  I've been reading and reading and scouring the forums and internet all day between the 
installs and finding nothing that fits this particular problem.


-- 
All that is necessary for the triumph of evil is that good men do nothing.  -Edmund Burke