I also get kernel panic with harddrive which has 3 partitions on it: swap, ext3 and ntfs. So it is not just reiserfs. Worked just fine with -19mdk kernel.
Please try .test3 kernel on a UP system. I think you really should get a message about "partition table consistency checks" failure and a reason in parenthesis (when determining disk partitions).
<http://people.mandrakesoft.com/~gbeauchesne/kernel/>
And BTW, do you happen to have two disks? And the system one being the second?
