I had RedHat 7.0 for school last year, haven't used it in maybe 7 or 8 months. Booted to Linux last night, actually couldn't remember my login/password. Used the dropdown menu on top of the login window to "Reboot", and when I did, it proceeded to stall before even getting to the cascade of [OK]'s:

VFS: Cannot open root device 03:46
Kernel panic: VFS: Unable to mount root fs on 03:46

Any help?

Thanks

hello,
when it reboots it shoudl drop to you a command prompt - do a fsck.ext2 /dev/partition number - that should find and fix any probs.

Hi,

One work around way to boot the system is create a boot disk and boot the system with that boot floppy.

this can be a temporary solution. Use mkbootdisk command. (sure about RedHat linux).

regards,
Mahesh

Felecha, you did say that the first boot worked fine, but that you didn't recall your password and then when you tried rebooting one more time then is when the problem came??
Usually a problem like that has to do with not enabling on the kernel the correct file type system to be mounted, for example if you failed to click on the ext2 support which usually comes already clicked by default, or another possibility can be that you may be using scsi hardrives, like I do, and you need load into the kernel the respective scsi adapters so that your system can be read. But please clarify how exactly the problem began and after you did what...thanks

zLinuxz