Last week I was bored, so I downloaded the slackware 10 isos, repartitioned my harddrive and installed it.

I wanted to recompile the kernel and get 2.6.7 going, had some trouble, but had a eureka moment at four in the morning and got it working. Three days of happy messing around later there was this sale on hdds and I felt like doing it all again.

Being crazy I didn't take notes the first time, or even save my .config, etc ...

I'm hoping some one can guess what worked the last time.

I do a full install. Am dual booting with WinXP, using lilo.

The kernel I get fresh from install works ok ... but its not shiny enough for me. I can install the packages in /testing on cd 2 and the precompiled generic 2.6.7 kernel works (once I figured out what that initrd thing was).
I can even take the config used for that kernel (with a bunch of crap that I don't need) and compile it (takes eight days) and it works.

So I've decided I'm just misconfiguring my kernel. I think its a file system thing because the errors I keep getting happen when it starts trying to mount my root.

I formated my partitions in reiserfs.

Any ideas?

I'm posting from work, so don't have the error message here, will check this when I start messing around tonight and maybe post them.

BTW I've reinstalled around 2-3 times and recompiled lots more in the last 24 hrs. Some installs I tried the kernels off the cd first, jic that'd help, others I left them alone. Lately I've had the most luck using the initrd stuff. But its not mentioned in many of the recompiling threads and I seem to remember that the time it worked last week I didn't do that.

You may try enable ReiserFS support as built-in in kernel config.

Always do. Mostly as builtin, sometimes as module. Its something else.

Maybe the module for your hard drive controler (ide or scsi) is missing ?

Look at Device Drivers > ATA/ATAPI or SCSI Device support

Pretty sure its there ... I see it find my ide stuff, UDMA 133 when it needs to be, hda definetly exists at this point.

I just got home for the weekend, fresh install ... noticed 2.6.8.1 is out ... wish me luck.

I really must try to be scientific about this next time.

I've got it running, but I probably don't know how.

I decided that maybe the ide chipset I had guessed was right wasn't, even though it was the only via in the config and says its via busmastering ... so I compiled without it.

And I finally got past the vfs error. But my 2 160g maxtor e-ide hdd that I know can do udma133 were doing pio. Thinking eureka, I must have found it, (and cursing the unnamed writers of a broken driver) I went back and put it back in, compiled, and .... it still works. In fact, it works like it should. Nothings broke.

So why do I wish I had been scientific about it?

Because on the same compile that I took out the via stuff, I took out support for ext2 and ext3, leaving reiserfs. And might have done any number of other prunings. So I don't know what the problem was.

But I saved that .config file.

Isn't ignorance bliss? At least I didn't have to try as many times as Edison did to get the lightbulb.


BTW, can't I have a 2.6.what-have-u kernel with support for the three main linux fs's? Isn't the kernel from the /testing dir on cd 2 doing that .... so what else did I do?

Here is my config for filesystem :
CONFIG_EXT2_FS=y
CONFIG_EXT2_FS_XATTR=y
CONFIG_EXT3_FS=y
CONFIG_EXT3_FS_XATTR=y
CONFIG_FS_MBCACHE=y
CONFIG_REISERFS_FS=y
CONFIG_XFS_FS=m
CONFIG_ISO9660_FS=m
CONFIG_ZISOFS_FS=m
CONFIG_UDF_FS=m
CONFIG_FAT_FS=m
CONFIG_MSDOS_FS=m
CONFIG_VFAT_FS=m
CONFIG_PROC_FS=y
CONFIG_HFS_FS=m
CONFIG_HFSPLUS_FS=m
CONFIG_NFS_FS=y

As you can see, ext2, ext3 and reiserfs are compiled as built-in and it works fine

I don't know if this will help but I got the same error after a compile attempt on 2.6.7. I'm still attempting to compile the kernel successfully so take my words with a pinch of salt. I made the NTFS (WinXP) partition visible to Linux when I installed Slackware so it would appear in the root directory. When I compiled the new kernel I forgot to add support for the NTFS filesystem during the menuconfig stage. I wonder if that had anything to do with it