I recently installed Slackware 10.2 onto a Dell Inspiron E1405. It worked just fine with the 2.4.31 kernel that was installed by default but I have been trying to upgrade to a 2.6 kernel without success.
I first tried compiling the kernel (2.6.16.19) myself and went through everything making sure everything was properly selected, compile everything, install and reboot and it halts with this error:
Code:
VFS: Cannot open root device "302" or unknown-block(3,2)
Please append a correct "root=" boot option
Kernel panic - not syncing: VFS: Unable to mount root fs on unknown-block(3,2)
So I went back to the configuration thinking that maybe I had forgotten to compile my root file system into the kernel, once I had checked that and a few other option I recompiled and tried again. Same error.
Then I figure maybe I just am not doing to well at choosing the options for this kernel, so I install the 2.6.13 kernel and modules in the /testing directory open up the config to make sure that my root file system is included and compile everything again. I reboot to find the same error. So I try again with the 2.6.16.19 kernel in the Slackware-current's /testing dir and get the same error.
Then I booted into SLAX 5.1.6 (kernel 2.6.16) to see if maybe 2.6 kernels don't like my laptop. It boots and works fine, but I noticed something strange, SLAX had recognized the hard drive had /dev/sda while Slackware saw the drive as /dev/hda, so I tried messing with that but I got basically the same error.
here is the pertinent part of my lilo.conf
Code:
# Linux bootable partition config begins
image = /boot/vmlinuz
root = /dev/hda2
label = Slackware
read-only # Non-UMSDOS filesystems should be mounted read-only for checking
# Linux bootable partition config ends
image = /boot/vmlinuz-ide-2.4.31
root = /dev/hda2
label = 2.4.31
read-only
image = /boot/vmlinuz-2.6.16.19
root = /dev/hda2
label = 2.6.16.19
read-only
Any suggestions would be greatly appreciated.