Red Hat Bugzilla – Bug 6546
Kernel Panic... unable to mount root fs...
Last modified: 2015-01-07 18:39:22 EST
Hi! I have a dual Pentium II (Xeon) box running Win NT v. 4 and Red Hat Linux version 6.0. Booting is controlled by the Win NT OS Loader (I had used Bootpar to setup the proper option within the OS Loader to bring Lilo and boot linux off /boot partition.) I have a hard drive split into several partitions: C: DOS1 FAT /dos 2047MB Linux /boot 24MB D: DOS2 FAT /dos2 3004MB Linux /swap 133MB Linux /home 4001MB Linux /usr/local 2000MB Linux / 6150MB I went ahead and bought Red Hat Linux v. 6.1 and use the upgrade option with the new image boot disk: Red Hat 6.1 boot-RHEA-1999:044.img I only followed the upgrade option. After rebooting, I got the Lilo prompt (not the OS Loader prompt as I used to get), and when I request the "linux" or "linux-up" options I get the following Kernel panic message: Kernel Panic: VFS: Unable to mount root fs on 08:0a Any solutions? Unfortunately, I don't have a rescue disk (looks like I lost the one for 6.0! Blah! and the installation never asked for building one for 6.1) Help! I can pick the option "dos" under Lilo and it will bring up Win NT OS Loader. This allows me to load NT, but if I pick the linux option it hangs (this is no surprise because I have not used bootpar to bring up-to-date the NT loader.) Any solutions to the problem of mounting the root fs? I've tried doing a new upgrade installation with the original boot disket. This made no difference. Thanks!
You can use the 6.1 CDROM to get into rescue mode without having to use a boot disk. This is a new feature in the 6.1 installer, as with previous installers, the user had to have the boot disk made during the installation as well as a rescue.img diskette. Just throw the CDROM into the drive and type "linux rescue" at the boot prompt. This will drop you into a bash shell where you should be able to rerun lilo to determine why you are getting a kernel panic as a result of not finding the root partition. Reopen this bug if you continue to have problems.