Problem...

[John Saylor]

[x]
>  For a long time I was running linux-1.0.9 without problems. Yesterday,
>I decided to upgrade my entire system by doing a full install from scratch.

That is the problem [half-joke].

>The system gets
>goes so far and then bails with:
>
>MINIX-fs:unable to read superblock
>EXT2-fs: unable to read superblock
>XIA-fs: read super_block failed (inode.c 74)
>MSDOS bread failed
>Kernel panic: VFS: unable to mount root
>
> Does anyone have any clues on what could be done with this whole problem?

It could be a thousand different things; you made a noble effort to
give us the diagnostics from your system, but they are inconclusive
[what happens when it bails during the install?].  

It sounds like either your /dev/hdb partition table was improperly
written to the disk [reformat it, there's nothing on it- right?], or
the kernel is pointed toward /dev/hda as your root device.

Good Luck!

jsaylor