The Saga continues

[mark at buttery.org (Mark J. Dulcey)]

Nick Oleksinski wrote:
> 
> Hi Again:
> Well, in my ongoing struggle to try & get my kernel to work with my
> ethernet card I built the kernel version 2.2.18 up from 2.2.13.  What's
> unfortunate is that my system won't boot now- it gives me the following
> message:
> 
> VFS: Cannot open root device 21:07
> kernel panic: VFS: Unable to mount root fs on 21:07

A possible problem is that the root device isn't set properly in your
kernel file (and your boot loader isn't overriding it). There are two
ways to fix that problem:

1. Pass the root= argument to your boot loader. If you're using LILO,
this is a quick one to try; get to the prompt in LILO, and type
something like 'linux root=/dev/hda3', where you supply the correct
device name and partition number for your boot partition. You can make
the change permanent by editing your lilo.conf file and running lilo.

2. Use the rdev command to change the default root partition of your
Linux kernel. You type something like 'rdev /boot/vmlinuz /dev/hda3'.

If that doesn't help, it probably means that you forgot to build all the
necessary IDE disk support into your kernel. (You want it built in, not
as a module.) It's possible that your old kernel was depending on using
an initrd (initialization ramdisk) to load a module for the drive; some
distributions do that, especially for SCSI drives. That won't work for
your new kernel unless you built a new ramdisk image - but if you're
building a kernel anyway, it's easier to just build the boot device in
and not bother with the initrd kludge.
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