Slack 13 kernel panic at boot
 

Hey!

My main machine, my laptop was running without a glitch until about 10 minutes ago when I shut it down to go to bed. Having forgot to do something before that, I restarted the laptop and ended up with a Kernel panic error... basically, I have 2 HDD's with 2 md devices (raid devices). md0 has /dev/sda5 & /dev/sdb5 and md1 has /dev/sda6 & /dev/sdb6... the / partition is on md0.

The error (at least what I can see on the monitor) seems to be:

ReiserFS: md0: warning: vs-5150: search_by_key: invalid format found in block 32942. Fsck?
ReiserFS: md0: warning: vs-13070: reiserfs_read_locked_inode: i/o failure occured trying to find stat data of [1 2 0x0 SD]
ReiserFS: md0: Using r5 hash to sort names
VFS: Cannot open root device "900" or unknown-block(9,0)
Please append a correct "root=" boot option; here are the available partitions:
0300 4194302 hda driver: ide-cdrom
0800 195360984 sda driver: sd
0801 blablabla sda1
0802 blablabla sda2
0803 blablabla sda3
0804 blablabla sda5
0805 blablabla sda6
0806 blablabla sda7
0810 195360984 sdb driver: sd
0811 blablabla sdb1
0812 blablabla sdb2
0815 blablabla sdb5
0816 blablabla sdb6
0817 blablabla sdb7
0900 blablabla md0 (driver?)
0901 blablabla md1 (driver?)
Kernel Panic - not syncing: VFS: Unable to mount root fs on unknown-block(9,0)

Sorry if there is missing info, I retyped what I se on the laptop monitor....

If anybody can save me, this is my main machine, I need it running asap...... :(
THANKS!!!

Try to boot your laptop with the cd and have a look at your md0 device.

Try running fschk as suggested and see if it fixes the problem.
Maybe you can use a cd from your harddrive manufacturer to check your drive. If you havn't changed anything and this problem occurs, it might be related to a harddrive crash.

Hey thanks for the reply! GREATLY appreciated!

I booted my laptop with the Slack DVD and ran reiserfsck on all reiser partitions. The array /dev/md0 was the only one that had a bad tree, so reiserfsck suggested to rerun the tool with the -rebuild-tree option which I did and fixed some stuff....

However, now when I try to boot, I get further in the process but still ends up with a kernel panic, attempted to kill init... !?!?!?

During the -rebuild-tree process, I noticed that reiserfsck was resizing (?) several blocks or whatever they are. Could it be the problem? Corrupted files?

What should I do from there?

vbisis,

I ended up re-installing slack alltogether... I can nbow boot in my system and access my files as usual...

Would you think what happened might indicate premature HDD failure??? my feeling is that somehow the partition on md0 got corrupted and the kernel couldnt mount it as necessary.

I guess next step is to backup EVERYTHING!

Funny thing, I created a new user (as root) for my normal account, and upon logging with the new account I received only a blank screen, no desktop nothing.... COuldnt reboot either. Had to hard reset the machine.

Was a bad drive.... replaced and now it is OK