Hi everybody,

i 'm trying to install suse 8.0 on my Targa Roadwarrior 700 Notebook. The installation procedure worked fine, but when i am now trying to boot the system it always hangs with the following message:

Kernel Panic: VFS: Unable to mount root fs on 03:03

at sdb.suse.de i found a thread regarding this problem, but it didn't solve my problem:

i tried the following:
linux mem=24M root=/dev/hda1 init=/bin/bash

i've also updated the bios, because i thought it is problem with the memory handling. but it didn'T solve the problem.

What else can i do? Maybee someone knows a Homepage which contains an overview of the lilo boot parameters.

Can someone help me??

Friendly Regards

Sam

I'm not familiar with SuSE, but it sounds like you don't have support for the filesystem built-in to the kernel (it must be built in, not a module) I do know that SuSE uses the ReiserFS fs by default, try looking into recompiling your kernel with this support built-in.

A little more info would also be helpful; was your system working before? If so, what did you do that made it start giving you this message? etc. etc.

Hi,

no the OS haven't worked before on this Notebook. How can I rebuild the kernel if i am not able to boot the system? Also filesafe doesen't work...

This is what if found at sdb.suse.de regarding this problem, but just how i 've said it doesn't work:

http://sdb.suse.de/en/sdb/html/rootfs_0803_install.html

Any other hints on this problem?

Greets Sam

Has nobody an idea? Is this problem is distribution dependent, or hardware dependent??

Greets Sam

is it a default kernel or self-compiled?

must be some config error (I got this message because I had misc, elf and a.out binaries as modules, for instance)

can you choose between kernel images during installation?

The running (or better not running?) kernel is a default kernel.

does this mean that i have to reinstall?

I think the only way to get the system runing is to create a bootable floppy to change the config of the kernel, isn't it?
Whats the differenc between a bootdisk and the linux rescue system which can be booted from cdrom?? there isn't a difference isn't there?

GReets sam

There may be a couple of reasons this. Normally, a distribution will only install things for which it has a working kernel for. Otherwise it makes no sense.

Maybe your hard drive is not supported by Suse. You can try the tomsrtbt boot floppy, it can be made out from a Windows box using rawrite. There is also Knoopix that makes a pretty darn good job in autodetecting the hardware. It's a boot CD.

Of course, with those two, you'll have to investigate your hardware all by yourself. Knoopix will only activate the swap partition if it finds one, other than that, nothing is mounted. But if you can manually mount if from Knoopix, than mayby it could mean that Suse borked during install.

I'm having the exact same problem on 2 of my computers. I'm running Slackware 9.0, and Redhat 8.0. Both have LILO.

On the Redhat 8.0 box, if I don't push any buttons on the lilo screen to choose with kernel to use, it boots fine. Even if I just hit ENTER, I get the Kernel Panic.

On my Slackware 9.0, I can't get around it. It was working just great a few days ago, and now nothing. All my hardware used to work just fine. Now, No matter which kernel I try. I get the same Kernel Panic.

I've now changed to Red Hat, which works fine, it really seems to be a kind of incompability with the harddisk, however i thought something like this is impossible for a linux system and only kernel depending...

The only Probs i know have, the X system always hangs my system. And i don't know how to disable it during startup

Greets Sam