Unable to mount root fs
 

This hasn't happened before...I got a new SCSI hard-drive and went to go recompile my 2.4.20 kernel on Red Hat 8.0. I have compiled ext3 support into the kernel and my root partition is located at /dev/sda3. However, in LILO when I say "root = /dev/sda3" under my new image in lilo.conf it cannot mount the root filesystem when I boot into. I'm positive /dev/sda3 is the root partition. I also make an new initrd image each time with the "make install" command. I have only run into this problem when I went to SCSI... Upgrading my kernel on IDE couldn't have been easier. What could be causing this?? My root partition is pretty full, but I don't see how that would cause this problem.

If your PC still thinks it has to boot off IDE it will ignore any bootable partitions on SCSI drives. You still have an IDE drive installed? If you add or remove a SCSI HDD it can also change which drive is sda.

Also, what is it not doing? Do you get an error trying to run lilo or does it just boot with the old kernel even after you execute lilo and reboot?

I'm not really sure what's going on but hopefully something there helps you out, if not post more info. I dealt with all kinds of oddball SCSI boot order sctuff and my current firewall, due to BIOS limitations, boots off the MBR on an IDE drive to access my root linux partition on sda2 and it's onboard SCSI!

Nope, no IDE drives whatsoever. And it's like I never did have an IDE hard-drive because I did a low level format. No errors when running lilo. ONLY an error when I try to boot into the new kernel. I get the kernel panic error, unable to mount root filesystem, etc