[SOLVED] Kernel panic - not syncing: VFS: Unable to mount root fs on unknown-block(8,1)

I've been running Slackware 13.37 for about a year on my laptop. It's a very stable OS and I really like it. This morning, I woke up to a power outage and my laptop which had been left on the previous night was dead. I attempted to boot and received a Kernel panic message:

 Kernel panic - not syncing: VFS: Unable to mount root fs on unknown-block(8,1)

I have loaded up the Slackware DVD to try and use as a recovery console, but it's getting me nowhere. I've tried running e2fsck and I get an error message about a bad superblock. I've tried running something along the lines of

 e2fsck -b 8193 /dev/sda1

Which returns a long message about how the superblock cannot be read or does not describe a correct ext2 filesystem.

I tried to see what fdisk had to say about /dev/sda1 by running

 fdisk /dev/sda1

Which returned:

 fdisk.bin: unable to read /dev/sda1: Inappropriate ioctl for device

fsck /dev/sda1

Returns:

/sbin/e2fsck: Attempt to read block from filesystem resulted in short read while trying to open /dev/sda1
Could this be a zero-length partition?

Really hoping I don't have to re-install.

Edit: Just out of curiosity I ran the "setup" utility and it told me that I had no linux partitions on my machine and prompted me to create one. I ran the partition table and /dev/sda1 did not show up at all. After running "cfdisk /dev/sda" it shows a 160GB partition of "Free Space"

Conclusion? Did you end up reinstalling everything?

Okay, I have made some progress. But now I have a new issue.

From the recovery console (Slackware DVD) I ran "cfdisk" and changed the type of file system from "Free space" to "Linux" on /dev/sda. Cfdisk calls this partition /dev/sda2 now. I am able to boot my laptop from the Slackware DVD by running the workaround suggested at boot time:

boot: hugesmp.s root=/dev/sda2 rdinit=rw

From there, I can use my system like normal. But I want to be able to boot without this, so I updated lilo to use /dev/sda2 instead of /dev/sda1 as the root to boot from. This has mixed results. I can boot, but only to a read-only filesystem.

The error I am getting now is:

Testing root filesystem status: read-only filesystem
Checking root filesystem:
fsck from util-linux 2.19
/sbin/e2fsck: No such file or directory while tyring to open /dev/sda1
Possibly non-existene device?

What do I need to change to get the system to check /dev/sda2 instead of /dev/sda1? Any ideas would be appreciated.

I honestly have no clue how you ended up with that kind of setup and am not sure exactly where your error message shows up and don't know anything about Lilo (I use Grub) but perhaps you have...
1) in the bootloader paramers somewhere sda1 mentioned (e.g. "root=/dev/sda1))?
2) in "/etc/fstab" the old entry "/dev/sda1 / <yourfs> <mount options> <other1> <other2>"?

Oh my goodness, thank you! It seems so obvious now that you pointed it out! But that did the trick. I would rather have my root on /dev/sda1, but I don't have to re-install and I've spent countless hours getting this installation right where I want it to be, so I'll take it. Anyway, thanks a lot; I appreciate it!

Hehe... welcome