I got an error yesterday on bootup and it said "kernel panic Unable to mount VFS on root filesystem". I opened up my box to make sure my hard disk plugs were all plugged in and things like that and it seemed fine then afterwards everything booted up successfully.

Is this the beginning of the end for my old hard drive? Is there something that can be fixed or worked around?

thanks.

It sounds like it was just a plug which came loose. I have had the same occasionally in the past. It is quite unlikely that it is a sign of a hard drive at death's door however if there is any important data (obviously) back it up. Chances are someone knocked the case quite hard and disconnected one (or two) of the pins of the IDE cable.

I just booted up again and I got the same error - I checked cables etc. and everything seems ok.

I got the error a the first time and then after I checked cables I got an error saying that the SCSI BIOS couldn't be installed. (it is a SCSI disk). The first time it said SCSI BIOS installed sucessfully then it failed later with the kernel panic message.

BTW the box i'm talking about is running SUSE 8.2 with a SCSI hard drive. I haven't done anything with kernel modules or patching or recompiling the kernel on this box since i installed Suse and I've booted it up every day for 100 days before this happened.

This is starting to sound a bit more worrying. The fact that it's different hardware which is failing however leads me to be a bit suspicious about blaming the hard drive. On a hunch if you can check the power supply that might be the problem. I had one start to fail a while back and spent forever trying to figure out why the machine would hang at random points in the kernel boot process. If this isn't the problem then trying to read the disk in another machine would probably be a good next step. I am not familiar with SCSI and don't know how easy it is to get working (jumpers, etc.) however as these probably haven't changed I don't imagine there's much chance of it being a configuration fault.

well the power supply is brand new and installed by someone i trust at the local computer store.

i have been having some strange intermittent network problems the last couple weeks. it seems completely unrelated though.

i don't have another machine except my windows machine which the company i work for owns and i'm not really at liberty to start screwing around with it although if that's my only way to test things then i could do it.

any other suggestions? thanks.

I am at a bit of a loss then. Obviously something is failing. Check that all the fans are running as it could be something overheating on the motherboard. Try powering the machine down for a while and see whether being cooled off helps.

well it's been off for about 15 minutes and now it booted up fine - no errors. seems like it's functioning properly. it was on overnight accidentally but there was no problem until i did a restart to test something out today. all the fans are working.

a mystery indeed. i'm not sure what to do about it though.