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Kernel panic - not syncing: VFS: Unable to mount root fs on unknown-block (202,16)

Hi

I got a new system with 500GB hard-disk and 8GB RAM.

1. I tried installing Ubuntu 8.04 64-bit DVD edition and Live worked but full installation failed at 61% due to bad DVD. (In process of downloading it again)

2. I tried installing using the CD version (Ubuntu 8.04 64-bit desktop) and I was getting this Kernel Panic error.

3. I now tried installing Fedora 9 64-bit and Im getting this error after hitting the install button :

Code:

.

.

.

md: autorun ...

md: autorun DONE.

RAMDISK: Compressed image found at block 0

invalid compressed format (err=2)

VFS: Cannot open root device "<NULL>" or unknown-block(202,16)

Please append a correct "root=" boot option; here are the available partitions:

0100    16384 ram0 (driver?)

0101    16384 ram1 (driver?)

0102    16384 ram2 (driver?)

0103    16384 ram3 (driver?)

0104    16384 ram4 (driver?)

0105    16384 ram5 (driver?)

0106    16384 ram6 (driver?)

0107    16384 ram7 (driver?)

0108    16384 ram8 (driver?)

0109    16384 ram9 (driver?)

010a    16384 ram10 (driver?)

010b    16384 ram11 (driver?)

010c    16384 ram12 (driver?)

010d    16384 ram13 (driver?)

010e    16384 ram14 (driver?)

010f    16384 ram15 (driver?)

Kernel panic - not syncing: VFS: Unable to mount root fs on unknown-block (202,16)

Ubuntu 8.04 64-bit DVD worked but it didnt seem to get rid off the partitions when installation failed ?
Is that why Im getting all these errors ?

What am I supposed to do now ? Nothing seems to work. Any way to format hard-disk ?

You can format the hard disk from the installer - whatever distro you use.

I have no idea what you've done so far, but:

"RAMDISK: Compressed image found at block 0
invalid compressed format (err=2)"

Whatever system was trying to boot did not find a valid compressed image. This could be because the image was corrupt or else the kernel does not have the driver built in to deal with this format (there are only 2 in use today really - 'initrd' which is a tar.gz archive, and 'initramfs' which is a cpio archive).

If you have nothing valuable on the disk, I suggest reinstalling whichever distribution you want and formatting all partitions as you go; that way you can be sure there are no old and irrelevant files which screw up the installation.

Quote:

If you have nothing valuable on the disk, I suggest reinstalling whichever distribution you want and formatting all partitions as you go; that way you can be sure there are no old and irrelevant files which screw up the installation.

I have nothing on this PC - Yet I cant seem to install Ubuntu or Fedora - both are returning Kernel panic.

Quote:

You can format the hard disk from the installer - whatever distro you use.

How can this be possible when after loading the Kernel I get the panic error and nothing works after that ?

This is the config of my system

Code:

Intel Core 2 Quad Q6600

2.4GHz 8MB cache 1066MHz

Intel Desktop MotherBoard DG33

8GB DDR2 RAM 800MHz Transcend (4 x 2GB)

1GB 8600 GT nVidia Graphics Card

500 SATA HDD Western Digital

Microsoft Wireless Keyboard & Mouse 700

20x Samsung DVD Writer

D-Link Wireless LAN Card

22" LG LCD monitor

My fedora c9 won't boot either

I have a Dell Dimension 4100 with a 250 GB primary hard drive and a 20 GB
secondary hard drive. The 20 GB drive has fedora c5 installed which
I boot from a 1 MB GRUB partition /dev/hda1. I've installed fedora c9
on part of the 250 GB primary drive, /dev/hda. /dev/hda2 is 100 MB for a boot partition. (I had to call it /boot1 because there was already a
/boot partition on /dev/hdb1) Nevertheless the installer did put
/vmlinuz-2.6.25-14.fc9.i686, initrd-2.6.25-14.fc9.i686.img, config-2.6.25-14.fc9.i686, and System-map-2.6.25-14.fc9.i686 on that drive.
I have /dev/hda3 for 1 GB os swap space. (There is also swap space for
fedora c5 on the secondary drive /dev/VolGroup01/LogVol01) /dev/hda4 is an
extended partition which is further subdivided into 20 GB partitions 5
through 15 inclusive. /dev/hda11 through /dev/hda14 are RAID partitions
assembled together as a raid5 partition of 60 GB /dev/md0. It is a
physical volume on which /dev/VolGroup00 resides. There are seven logical
volumes of various sizes LogVol00 through LogVol06. These are mounted at /,
/home, /var, /tmp, /usr, /usr/local, and /opt.

I have added c9 to my /boot/grub/menu.lst on my GRUB partition. It boots
either of a couple of c5 kernels but when I try to boot c9 I get:

Decompressing Linux...done
Booting the kernel.
RAMDISK: ran out of compressed data
invalid compressed format (err=1)
Kernel panic - not syncing: VFS: Unable to mount root fs on
unknown-block (0,0)

Since I can boot c5, I can mount /dev/VolGroup00/LogVol00 (the c9 root
partition) and snoop around. Here is /etc/mdadm.conf

MAILADDR root

ARRAY /dev/md0 level=raid5 num-devices=4 spares=1
UUID=cc91b4a3:a0315191:4f78f524:ea266550

I can also run fdisk, parted, and several guis from c5, e.g.,

# /sbin/fdisk -lu /dev/md0
Disk /dev/md0: 64.4GB 64477200384 bytes
2 heads 4 sectors/trac, 15741504 cylinders, total 125932032 sectors
Units=sectors of 1*512=512 bytes

Disk /dev/md0 doesn't contain a valid partition table

Here is what c9 has for /etc/fstab (Note the swap space)

# cat /mnt/test/etc/fstab
/dev/VolGroup00/LogVol00 / ext3 defaults 1 1
/dev/VolGroup00/LogVol01 /home ext3 defaults 1 2
/dev/VolGroup00/LogVol04 /var ext3 defaults 1 2
/dev/VolGroup00/LogVol03 /usr ext3 defaults 1 2
/dev/VolGroup00/LogVol05 /usr/local ext3 defaults 1 2
/dev/VolGroup00/LogVol06 /opt ext3 defaults 1 2
/dev/VolGroup00/LogVol02 /tmp ext3 defaults 1 2
UUID=943c7be1-0e16-49e5-ab0b-988fbde319b7 /boot ext3 defaults 1 2
tmpfs /dev/shm tmpfs defaults 0 0
devpts /dev/pts devpts gid=5,mode=620 0 0
sysfs /sys sysfs defaults 0 0
proc /proc proc defaults 0 0
/dev/VolGroup01/LogVol01 swap swap defaults 0 0
UUID=ce53b8be-361f-45ef-b3e6-af47b2d77db1 swap swap defaults 0 0

Is there something wrong with my initrd-2.6.25-14.fc9.i686.img file?
What else could cause (err=1) ?

Sorry this is so long.

jschlesi

I tried using the discs on other PCs - same errors - it seems that the iso that I downloaded is getting corrupt when I download over a long period of time.

anjanesh - I'm having the exact same problem. Did you find a way to solve it? You mentioned that it had to do with long download times? It took me several days to download the CD set for my x64 computer (3.2 GB total). Did you have any success downloading on a faster connection? I heard there is a possibility the .iso files are corrupted - any way to fix that? Did you try burning the .iso files again? Maybe it would run by setting up the .iso from the HDD instead of burning.

Any help would be appreciated.

thx. - BJ

Im on a 256kbps connection and it took me a week to download Fedora-9-x86_64-DVD.iso - burned it to 2 DVDs and still same result - Kernel Panic.

I downloaded ubuntu-8.04-dvd-amd64-bad.iso TWICE and similar results - Invalid CD for one & failed installation at 63%.

At first I thought that my new PC is gone but tried installing on another PC/HDD and got same results.

I thought my DVD Writer is not burning the ISO properly but its not it.

It has to be the download. I dont know if mirror hosts keep changing the DVD file or not. I did add some mirrors in the download manager (FDM) though.

I've ordered the 2 DVDs from kiraninfotech.com/store/ - Im yet to get them - I'll post back here once I try those.

How could this be?

Quote:

Originally Posted by anjanesh (Post 3175623)

I tried using the discs on other PCs - same errors - it seems that the iso that I downloaded is getting corrupt when I download over a long period of time.

It seems to me that your .iso disk was good enough to install completely,
otherwise you wouldn't have gotten to the boot stage and the kernel panic.
Once in the past, I had a kernel panic because I gave GRUB the boot
command before I gave it the initrd command see
http://www.howtoforge.com/working_with_the_grub_menu
Actually I think this one might be better:
http://www.redhat.com/docs/manuals/l...onfigfile.html
If you can check out /boot/grub/menu.lst, you can see whether or not there is an initrd command. Note in the menu.lst file you don't need the boot
command.
________________________

jschlesi

/root/install.log

I have discovered something that may solve my problem. In /root
there are three files:]
anaconda-ks.cfg install.log install.log.syslog
Here is the interesting portion of the second one:

Code:

Installing mkinitrd-6.0.52-2.fc9.i386

Installing kernel-2.6.25-14.fc9.i686



gzip: stdout: No space left on device

mkinitrd failed

error: %post(kernel-2.6.25-14.fc9.i686) scriptlet failed, exit status 1

Installing libIDL-0.8.10-2.fc9.i386

It is clear that there was an error during the installation even though
I thought my installation completed successfully. One thing to try, then,
is to increase the number of extents in some of my logical volumes.
OK, I've doubled the size of the root file system /, and increased
the home file system /home (this was dumb), /usr and /usr/local
Now I must install again and see if that does it.
__________________________

jschlesi

I increased the size of several of my file systems and reinstalled
fedora 9. It worked. There were a couple of times when I had trouble
getting the drive to read one of my disks, but each time I opened
the drive drawer and closed it again. Each time the drive then read the disk and whatever program was to be installed was installed.

So now fedora c9 boots and I can start adding the applications I want,
e.g., emacs and a DVD player.
__________________
jschlesi