I am not quite a newbie but I haven't used linux in about 4 years. I installed on an old cpu w/ standard ide cdrom and hard drives and everything worked fine. I just bought a new hard drive for my other computer and installed it. I have a 74GB sata drive for windows xp, a 160 GB sata drive for linux, a 5GB ide drive for linux swap, and an IDE cdrom drive. When i install with the sata kernel that comes with the install cds everything works fine. When i compile kernel 2.6.13 and install it, it runs up to mounting the file systems. After that it says VFS: kernel panic, ..... unknown block(a,b) and will not boot. Does anyone have any ideas? I am new to sata and I know linux sees through the bios emulation of ide through sata. Everything else works fine. Currently i am using the 2.4.x sata.i kernel that comes with the slackware 10.1 cds. Any help would be greatly appreciated. BTW i have tried enabling the sata option that says will interfere wil libata and i have tried disabling it with no success. Thanks.

-patrick (murdurus@carolina.rr.com)

are you using grub or lilo? could you post you conf.
It's prob looking at the wrong partition for root

I am using lilo... Here is my configuration file

LILO configuration file
# generated by 'liloconfig'
#
# Start LILO global section
boot = /dev/sdb
#compact # faster, but won't work on all systems.
prompt
timeout = 300
# Normal VGA console
vga = normal

... commented out section for framebuffer removed for size ...

# Linux bootable partition config begins
image = /boot/vmlinuz
root = /dev/sdb1
label = Linux
read-only # Non-UMSDOS filesystems should be mounted read-only for checking
# Linux bootable partition config ends
# Windows bootable partition config begins
other = /dev/sda1
label = Windows
table = /dev/sda
# Windows bootable partition config end

thanks, patrick

Have you compiled and make the initrd file, if so did you put its info in lilo.conf.
Also how did you compile you filesystems driver for the kernel included in the kernel or as a seperate module. If they are as modules you MUST make th initrd with the necessary drivers.

I hope your prob resumes to either of these two problems bosewicht or mine or else you will have to do some more debug to get it working with the new kernel.

JdogPc

what distro of linux are you using? I would take the 1'st install disc(if there are more than one) and boot up with it. It's going to ask you were is root and you're prob going to type something like
vmlinuz=/dev/sdb1
after you boot up. type
lilo
in a prompt