Booting Slackware 10.1 off a USB hard drive, getting a kernal panic
 

Hello,
I installed Slackware 10.1 onto a Fantom Drives 250GB USB hard drive. I partitioned half of it for linux, the other half for use in windows. The installation went fine, and I installed LILO onto the superblock of the linux partition. When I try to boot off of the USB hard drive, it gets so far (maybe 2 pages of boot text), and I get the following:

Kmod: failed to exec /sbin/modprobe -s -k block-major-8, errno=2
vfs: cannot open root devices "802" or 08:02
Please append a correct "root=" boot option
Kernal panic: VFS: unable to mount rootfs on 08:02

where it then proceeds to freeze.

I'm still pretty new to linux, I have installed Slackware 10.1 on an older computer, with only one internal drive and it being the only OS on it, and have had it run fine.

Any suggestions?

Thank you!

You will need to get back into 10.1 using the rescue disk because you will possibly need to compile the Kernel to create these modules instead of having them included in the Kernel -

jbd.o
ext3.o
scsi_mod.o
sd_mod.o
usbcore.o
uhci.o
usb-storage.o

This is what I did or will do when I upgrade to Slackware 11.00 using the 2.4 series Kernel.

Install/upgradepkg slackware onto the USB drive;
without rebooting compile the kernel to generate the required modules see

http://www.linuxquestions.org/questi...5&pagenumber=2
for the modules required
create the initrd image with the required modules;
create a boot cd, with the kernel and initrd;
test to ensure that you can boot from the cd;
do the lilo/grub, I use lilo - Slackware standard, business so that you can boot into slackware from the USB drive. This is the fun bit as if you're not careful you will overwrite the boot sector of your internal hard drive. If this happens get a live distro with testdrive-static so that you can recreate the win boot thingy on the internal hard drive.

I've been running with Slackware on a 20GB USB drive for several years upgrading through various releases in the process.

Good Luck

You'll probably have to custom build an initial ramdisk (initrd) and insert a sleep 10 command into the linuxrc that's part of the initrd and also put a rootdelay=10 entry in your lilo.conf. You should probably also install slack's LILO in the MBR of the external USB hard drive rather than in the superblock of its install partition.

For details, take a look at the following threads:

http://www.linuxquestions.org/questi...d.php?t=470883

http://groups.google.com/group/alt.o...2330a1a7139e10

http://support.zenwalk.org/index.php/topic,2387.0.html

Robert

You'll probably have to custom build an initial ramdisk (initrd) and insert a sleep 10 command into the linuxrc that's part of the initrd and also put a rootdelay=10 entry in your lilo.conf. All that you can probably do on the other system that has slack 10.1 on it (using mkinitrd) and then simply copy over the finished initrd.gz to your USB drive.

You should probably also install slack's LILO in the MBR of the external USB hard drive rather than in the superblock of slack's install partition.

For details, take a look at the following threads:

http://www.linuxquestions.org/questi...d.php?t=470883

http://groups.google.com/group/alt.o...2330a1a7139e10

http://support.zenwalk.org/index.php/topic,2387.0.html

Robert