Howdy,
I recently installed slack 10.2 on my old office computer (Pentium II 300) and I followed the tutorial by Shilo. Eveything went great until I tried to upgrade to the 2.6.13 kernel and now I am having an.....interesting...... issue.

I can still boot up the 2.4 kernel fine. When I first tried to boot up the 2.6 kernel I compiled I got the typical "kernel panic, VFS , unable to mount yada yada" and I remembered that I needed an initrd on my other computer. So I made an initrd (mkinitrd -c -k 2.6.13 -m reiserfs) and added it to my lilo.conf and when lilo pops up and I choose 2.6, it says "Loading Slackware2.6....... BIOS data check OK" then the screen makes it's normal sound where it shuts off then comes back on. Here is where I would usually see all the text about the booting up fly by, but instead nothing. Blank screen. I have left it for a while and nothing happens and it doesn't sound like the computer is doing anything. I tried using the vmlinuz-generic-2.6.13 and had the same issue; kernel panic w/o initrd, blank screen right after lilo w/initrd. Since the error is so early in the process I am lost as to what could be causing it. Any insight would be greatly appreciated!

Instead of using the ramdisk, I suggest compiling support for reiserfs directly into the kernel.

Under make menuconfig, go to File Systems, then answer Y[*] next to ReiserFS and see if that helps. You always need the filesystem regardless, so compiling it into your kernel always makes sense (you shouldn't need the three suboptions debugmode, /proc/fs or extended attributes though)

Try if that helps and if not, I'm sure I or someone else can twist our heads further

-Y1

my bad, I should have mentioned that. when I compiled my kernel I did include support for reiserfs, but I still got the "unable to mount root fs" kernel panic when I tried to start up so I tried the initrd. Thanks for the suggestion though. The thing that gets me the most about this problem is that it is so early on, I have no clue where to start troubleshooting. Luckily I can still run 2.4 while I try to figure this out.

Build support for your IDE chipset into the kernel.

(for example, mine is piix, so i'd press Y and build that into my kernel, not as a module)

If you don't know which one is yours, you can build in all of them(that is what Pat does.)

I use gconfig to set up my config before compiling the kernel, but I'm having a hard time finding where to choose my ide chipset. I looked under device drivers and poked around most everywhere (at least I thought) else. Any pointers would be greatly appreciated.

Oh, and does anyone know which IDE chipsets are supported in the generic kernel? I would have thought it would have included them all. Thanks again.

no one has any more ideas?

copy the existing 2.4 .config kernel file over to the /usr/src/linux-2.6 directory and then make xconfig or make oldconfig.

Be careful not to change too much at once and don't forget to edit the Makefile for 2.6 so that it exports to a different /boot subdir such as /boot/linux-2.6 and also to edit lilo.conf so that it correctly points to the new /boot as well as the existing root /dev/hdax.


Hmmmm,,not that clear....I feel a howto writting session coming on.

Try using the 2.6 kernel on the second disk.

Trying to configure a vanilla kernel for my machine was too much work, and wasn't working.

I installed slackware with the 2.4 kernel on my machine, downloaded the latest 2.6 kernel source, copied the config file out of the kernel-*-.tgz (the one with System.map & vmlinuz in it) on the second disk and then compiled & installed it myself.

After that, the 2.6 kernel worked, i went in and trimmed it down and re-compiled.

Yep, either of those will work just fine...nice use of a second hdd though.

haha!
I guess i was kinda vauge on that description, I forgot what I was trying to say when I re-read my own post.

I meant the second Slack CD, there's a directory with *.tgz's to install the 2.6 kernel on your machine. I didn't use them, I just extracted the config file provided in there to kickstart my own kernel-flavor.

Sorry for any confusion.