Greetings,

I'm not a newbie, but it's been some time since I worked regularly with a Linux system. I'm trying to get back into the swing of things, so please bare with.

I installed Slackware 12 onto my Western Digital 160GB drive, which I normally attach to my dell (xp) inspiron 9300 laptop. The installation process was like butter. No problems. I installed the mbr onto the external drive. Two linux partitions: 1GB swap (sdb1) and the root (sdb2) ext2.

I've seen the following problem on other posts, but haven't found a solution.

I set my bios to boot, first, from a usb device and this works. I boot and get the lilo screen. I hit enter at the boot prompt and it goes through the process and shortly thereafter I get the following error message:

"VFS: Cannot open root device '812' or unknown-block(8, 18)
Please append a correct 'root=' boot option
kernel panic - not syncing: VFS: Unable to mount root fs on unknown-block(8, 18)"

The process freezes at this point.

Here is my relevant lilo.conf for Slackware:
boot = /dev/sdb

#
image = /boot/vmlinuz
root = /dev/sdb2
label = /dev/sdb2
read-only
#

I'm able to go into this Slackware installation using Wolvix and it works fine. It just won't boot correctly. Any suggestions?

Many thanks...

Justin

Justin,

Go back into that partition in Wolvix, then cat the slackware intall partition's
/var/log/dmesg file, and post its contents here.

That will tell us us what's happening right before the VFS error.

Normally, it should work as long as all of the modules required to mount the root partition are loaded. With a more common installation (IDE hard drive installation) the disk and filesystem drivers are compiled into the kernel. In this case (USB disk root install), though, you'll need USB mass storage support, in addition to the filesystem.

I don't believe that the USB Mass Storage drivers are compiled into the kernel, so you may need to follow the mkninitrd instructions in the slackware root/install partition's /boot/ directory. This is because, for USB Mass Storage support, you'll need both the USB modules and the SCSI (emulation) modules loaded, before you can load the kernel on from that partition.

SM,

Thanks for the response. I booted Wolvix and then 'chrooted' into my usb installation. I was unable to find /var/log/dmesg. And entering dmesg at the prompt got me the output for Wolvix (I ran grep on dmesg using 'panic' and got no response).

I guess at this point, I'm going to have to look into mkinitrd.