I'm having a problem moving a device with a Linux installation on it from one system to another, and could use some help.

The original configuration was an x86 box with two IDE disk devices. It had WindowsXP installed on /dev/hda and Mandrake Linux 10 on /dev/hdb. It was possible to boot successfully into either system via BIOS selection of the boot device.

The new configuration is also an x86 box, with WindowsXP installed on its own drive, plus the Linux drive which I removed from the old system. In the new system, WinXP still boots fine but Linux does not. Here's the report:

VFS: Mounted root (ext2 filesystem)
Mounting /proc filesystem
Mounting sysfs
Creating device files
mounting tmpfs on /dev
starting udev
Creating root device
Mounting root filesystem
mount: error 6 mounting ext3 flags defaults
retrying without the option flags
mount: error 6 mounting ext3
retrying read-only without any flag
mount: error 6 mounting ext3
pivotroot: pivot_root(/sysroot,/sysroot/initrd) failed: 2
umount /initrd/sys failed: 2
umount /initrd/proc failed: 2
Initrd finished
Freeing unused kernel memory: 200k freed
Kernel panic: No init found. Try passing init= option to kernel.

...and that's as far as it goes.

Is it even possible to move to a new system like this? If so, how? Would it be better just to go through a re-install of the Linux software? Would a re-install overwrite my existing Linux partitions (root, swap, home)? Thanks!