Greetings all !
This is my first posting, so please bear with me.
I have an adaptec AHA-2940 UW card and a Seagate 18gb drive.
The only IDE device I'm using is a CD-Rom.
Scenario:
- I boot from Mepis cd, and proceed with installing onto my scsi drive
- Installation proceeds exactly the same as it does using an IDE drive, but with one MAJOR exception, upon the system rebooting ( to start for the first time with no CD in the drive ), the system halts with a fatal error

I have no problem installing with an IDE drive ... the system works great ....

If someone could answer this one I'd greatly appreciate it.

What was message of the fatal error?

That you haven't got a boot disk because the BIOS has been instructed to boot the SCSI disk? or something deeper?

The system TRIES to boot ... ie. it gives me the selection screen ( you know safe mode, etc. ), at this point I press enter to select the first choice.
So far, it starts normally .... then, it gives me the following message:

Kernel panic: VFS: Unable to mount root fs on unknown-block (0,0)

This is not a booting problem!

This is the kernel unable to cope with your system!

Um ..... unable to cope with my system?
It must be the Adaptec scsi card or the Seagate scsi hard drive then because as I said earlier, the system installs and runs just fine if I use an IDE hard drive.
Also, the HCL indicates that both of these scsi devices are 100% compatible, please elaborate saikee.

Thank you

Got another point to ponder ...
I've just loaded Mandriva Linux on it successfully ( actually it's the Limited 2005 version )
Computer installed correctly and booted up just fine; so the question is .... what's wrong with my favorite distro ?

It pays to do a MD5SUM check on the iso image of your Mepis.

This idea still has nothing to do with my problem. As I mentioned in the beginning; I can put an IDE hard drive into the same system with the same cd of Mepis and can successfully install and run the operating system.

Very odd, but I am currently having the EXACT same problem. Exact same hardware (weird eh?), same MEPIS. The live booted fine (I had to use the failsafe with no DMA, because that was causing a cloop error).

What I'm wondering is if having DMA enabled is messing things up. I'm unsure of how to boot to the 2.6 kernel while disabling the DMA. The grub command line is hard to understand.

Anyone know how I can get by this?

Working on it