From Bugzilla Helper: User-Agent: Mozilla/4.78 [en] (X11; U; Linux 2.4.9 i686) Description of problem: I made an update installation from RH 7.1 to Roswell and told the installer to make a boot diskette. But when booting with this diskette, the kernel stops after it has been started before mount the root fs with the msg that it can't be mounted. My system has only scsi disks (adaptec 2940), and it seems that aic7xxx is missing on the boot diskette. My old kernel (2.4.9) with inbound aic7xxx can boot the roswell edition without any problem. I had similar problems when updating fron RH 7.0 to 7.1 (Bug # 31477). Possibly, this problem occurs only when I make a text based update: A collegue of me told me that he has not the problem described above when he updates the system by using the GUI installer. Version-Release number of selected component (if applicable): How reproducible: Didn't try Steps to Reproduce: see above. Actual Results: VFS: Cannot open root device "sda..." or 08:xx Please append a correct "root=" boot option Kernel panic: VFS: Unable to mount root fs on 08:xx Expected Results: system boots completely. Additional info: --
I was not able to reproduce this test. My test machine with an Apaptec 2940 booted just fine off the boot floppy. Could something be damaged with your floppy? Try mounting the floppy in the system and post the output of 'ls -al' to Bugzilla.
There is nothing damaged with the floppy. If I mount it on another LINUX system, then ls -lR shows tho following: ls -lR /mnt /mnt: total 816 -rwxrwxr-x 1 root root 203 Sep 6 08:54 boot.msg -r-xr-xr-x 1 root root 6192 Sep 6 08:54 ldlinux.sys -rwxrwxr-x 1 root root 104 Sep 6 08:54 syslinux.cfg -rwxrwxr-x 1 root root 827322 Aug 14 11:27 vmlinuz Using this floppy (I made the same test on another 7.1 system upgraded to roswell and failed too), boot stops (after the kernel has benn loaded and started) with the following msg's: request_module_[block-major-8]: Root fs not mounted VFS: Cannot open root device "sda1" or 08:01 Please append a correct "root=" boot option Kernel panic: VFS: Unable to mount root fs on 08:01 -------------- This behaviour can be reproduced. The problem is an old one (I had it too when upgrading from 7.0 to 7.1), but not from 6.2 to 7.0. I think, the aic7xxx module is missing for mounting the root fs. And I think, if _YOUR_ kernel would have this module inbound, booting would be possible: I made a boot floppy from my 2.4.9 kernel which has aic7xxx inbound, and this kernel boots correctly from the floppy.
this bootdisk was made from the stock kernel? there is no initrd on it. could you attach your /etc/modules.conf from this box?
The bootdisk was made by anaconda at the end of the update process. The used Kernel is vmlinuz-2.4.7-2 (that is your RH7.2 beta roswell kernel!) /etc/modules.conf: # alias scsi_hostadapter aic7xxx # alias eth0 3c59x # alias parport_lowlevel parport_pc # alias usb-controller usb-uhci This is exactly my /etc/modules.conf _before_ the upgrade (my kernel 2.4.9 does not need any module, but 2.4.7-2 needs aic7xxx for booting!!).
you commented out the scsi_hostadaptor line in /etc/modules.conf. that means that modular kernels will not load any kernel drivers for your scsi controller at all. Even if you have the drivers compiled in, leave the entries in /etc/modules.conf.
Ooops! If I understand you correctly, this means: never remove entries in an /etc/modules.conf which had been produced by the very first RedHat installation? Even if I compile my own kernel with inbuild drivers? Does this mean, that in principle RedHat assumes that the user does not modify or exchange the kernel installed by the RedHat installer? And does this mean, that during upgrade no hardware recognition is done? :-(( Well, enough of discussions, I think we can close this bug. Regards Joachim Backes