"Starting hotplug subsystem: pci" stall
 

Hi,

I'm trying to boot Morphix (a Knoppix variant) off a usb hdd.
I installed Morphix on it with the install utility that comes on the live cd and that all went fine. It installed LILO to the MBR of the usb drive.

The problems come when I try to boot. I've set my bios to boot from the usb drive and so, when I switch my computer on, LILO comes up and asks me if I want to boot Linux. At the boot brompt I type "Linux root=/dev/sda1" and press CR and it begins to boot. It works fine until it tries to mount the root fs and it says something like...

"Kernel Panic: VFS: Unable to mount root fs on /dev/sda1 08:01"
"Please specify a correct "root=" option"

...So I tried booting with a bootdisk from RUNT, (a small version of ZipSlack) which is supposed to boot a linux system on /dev/sda1 and it boots fine until it comes up with a message saying something like...

"Starting hotplug subsystem: pci"

...and then it just stalls there and doesn't do anything else!

I'd really appreciate some help with this problem as I've been trying to get it to work for ages.

Thanks a lot!

-landfill.

Anyone?..

Well first thing that comes to mind (and I'm NO expert) is to check IF you CAN boot off the usb drive? The error message you show is that its not finding a root disk to boot from (I think)

I'm pretty sure that I can boot from the USB drive because I used to boot ZipSlack off it before I formatted it to ext3.
Do you think it's a problem with ext3. Should I use ext2?

nah, I don't see how ext3 could be a problem. I'm just commenting on what I see in the error message.

Is /dev/sda1 the correct drive designation maybe?

Sorry, I'm a real noob.
Yeah, I think /dev/sda1 is correct, cos when I mount that drive for external storage when I'm running the live cd, It's /dev/sda1.
I've tried /dev/sdb1 as well, and It comes up woth the same thing