Mandrake 9.1 problem

I had Mandrake 8.2 working on my machine. I upgraded to 9.1 and now I
can't boot to linux (though booting to Windows still works). The
message that I get mentions a "Kernal Panic". I am not that
knowledgeable with linux and have no idea what is going on. Any help
would be appreciated.

thanx
tom

I reinstalled (as opposed to upgrading) and got it to work.
Fortunately, this isn't a machine with any critical data on it.
Still, any advice on what the error meant and how to avoid this in the
future would be appreciated.
tom