I have install and used linux many time red hat and mandrake always installs ok, this time trying to install on older compaq presario and mandrake just stops and nothing have to restart computer, red hat says can not mount root device??? have tried everything I can think of, any help would be appreciated as I want to get linux going again.


thanks dm

wow well welcome to lq.
first of all what about the compaq. harddrive type specifically. I think that you have some proprietary hardware and linux does not recognize it. Hence it gives up. now I know that on redhat install you can ctl alt f1 though f4 to get different terminals. One is a tty. Try the mount command. example mount /dev/hda1 <---assuming first disk first partition ide device. Then try fdisk /dev/hda and press p put the out put here. Unfortuanitly I need more specifics about hardware, version of redhat or mandy, and the exact problem and where it happens to help.
Thank you,
wolfe

thanks for help

compaq presario 2276 it is a seagate hdd, have tried also fujitsu and quantum hdds always same error which is as follows

red hat 7.1 cd install

VFS: cannot open root device "" or 08:41
please append a correct "root = " boot option
Kernal panic: VFS: unable to mount root fs on 08:41

help appreciated

thanks dm

are you booting with autoboot from dos??
if so look at the autoboot.bat file in the d:/tools/ dir. It has a command like loadlin root=vfs initrd.img vmlinuz or something like that. Then check with the loadlin docs. I had a similar problem and copied the tools dir to my c: and edited the loadlin command to fix it. check out
http://www.sgtwilko.f9.co.uk/redhat/boot.html

when you look at the bat file look for the root= option more than likly this is what is wrong but just guessing
wolfe

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