Hi All,
I have installed Gentoo 2006.1, but I can't boot: while booting, the error message is
VFS: Cannot open root device "hda3" or unknown-block(0,0)
Please append a correct "root=" boot option
Kernel panic - not syncing: VFS: Unable to mount root fs on unknown-block(0,0)
I am still pretty new to Linux, so I am following the "HOWTO Install Gentoo Developers Method with NPTL and 2.6 from Stage1" guide (
I am not allowed to post links?) to walk through the process of installing Gentoo. I am learning a lot.
Now, I realize that what I describe is a common problem (searching on Google), the common points of failure are GRUB configuration and lack of built-in kernel support for devices and filesystems.
But I still can't figure it out. Here is what I am doing....
My partitions are
Root:
/dev/hda3 (~20GB, ReiserFS file system)
Boot:
/dev/hda6 (~750MB, ReiserFS file system)
Swap:
/dev/hda7
my GRUB entry for Gentoo is
title Gentoo Linux
kernel /vmlinuz ro root=/dev/hda3
and I compiled my 2.6.17-gentoo-r8 kernel with built-in support for
- Enhanced general ATA/IDE
- IDE/ATA-2 DISK
- IDE/ATAPI CDROM
- SCSI disk
- ReiserFS
My harddrive is a Maxtor IDE device connected to an ATA storage controller. I am not totally certain that my kernel options cover this (what other IDE-related options might I need?).
I also tried using an initrd file (built with mkinitrd, added an initrd line to GRUB), but still have the same problem. Is my GRUB configuration correct? Based on the error message, "Unable to mount root fs", is my problem more likely with the device or the filesystem?
I'm really stuck. Any guidance or comments will help.