I successfully installed Red Hat Linux 7 (custom installation) but when I tried to boot, the system halted after about 10 or 15 seconds and the last message on the screen said: Kernel panic: VFS: Unable to mount root fs on 03:03 During the installation, I requested the bootloader be installed in the first sector of the boot partition and not overwrite my disk's MBR. Therefore, to boot Linux I booted from the diskette I made during the installation. I called Red Hat Support and, after several unsuccessful attempts to resolve the problem, they recommended I post this report. Prior to this installation attempt, I had used Partition Commander to shrink my Windows partition and set up two other partitions (a root and a swap partition) in which I had Red Hat Linux 5.2 installed and running just fine. During the most recent installation attempt I used fdisk to set up three primary partitions for Linux 7 as follows: Dev. Start End Blocks Id System hda2 405 407 24097+ 83 Linux Native (/boot) hda3 408 412 40162+ 82 Linux Swap hda4 413 622 1686825 83 Linux Native (/) My computer is a Gateway PC (Pentium MMX 200Mhz) with 32Mb memory.
somehow your bootfloppy tries to mount your swap-partition as / (03:03 is hda3), this obviously is very wrong, this sounds like an installer bug. To get your machine working, you could pass "root=/dev/hda4" to the kernel commandline.
Red Hat support suggested this earlier and I tried it with no success. However, I have been able to successfully install and boot Linux. At the suggestion of Jeff from Red Hat support, I repartitioned my hard drive and enlarged the root partition from 1674MB to 2408MB. This time I used Disk Druid instead of fdisk to make the following partitions: Mount Size Actual Point Type Rqstd Size Device ----- ------------ ----- ------ ------ /boot Linux Native 16M 23M hda2 Linux Swap 32M 39M hda5 / Linux Native rem 2408M hda6 This installation was successful and as far as I can determine, the only two differences between this and the previous installation was 1). The larger root partition, and 2). The root (and swap) partitions were set up to be extended, rather than primary, partitions. Thanks for your help. Don Wright
Hi ! I had a similar experience, but it was because the NFS part of the kernel is compiled as module, and thereofre has to be present in the initrd file, otherwise no access to the partition is possible. My problem was solved after I added the line initrd=/boot/inird-<version>.img to the lilo.conf file, ran lilo and rebooted. Pascal
Please try a more recent version of Red Hat Linux as many issues have been fixed.