Hi,

I'm having some trouble setting up a new Slack install 10.2. Default install goes fine, I've partitioned into this layout:

/dev/hda1 --> / (primary)
/dev/hda5 --> swap (logical)
/dev/hda6 --> /usr (logical)
/dev/hda7 --> /home (logical)

However, I'm now trying to recompile the kernel to version 2.6.17.11. I've dones this like a million times before, but something has me stumped. The system is as follows:

AMD Athlon64 3000+
MSI K8N Neo Platinum NF4 (Rev. 1)
1024Mb DDR RAM (single stick)
ATI 7xxx Graphics card PCI
Hard drive, cdrom, (IDE) etc, etc.
Most SATA options are disabled

Everytime I try to start up a new kernel recompile, I end up with an error:

Kernel Panic - VFS: Cannot open root device "301" or unknown block(3,1)

I know that you must select anc compile in the appropriate filesystem(s), in my case it's ReiserFS - which is most definetely compiled into the kernel and NOT as a module, but I'm still receiving the same error.

Then I thought that maybe the IDE drive isn't getting found and so I added all the generic and NVidia IDE options in and now I'm getting this error:

attempt to access beyond end of device
hda2: rw=16 want=8, limit=2
Kernel panic - not syncing: I/O error reading memory image

This is from a clean compile, with the only options selected:

ReiserFS, ext2, ext3 filesystem(s) suppport
IDE options (mentioned above)
Nothing else is touched and above are compiled into the kernel.

From what I can see as it's booting up, the hard drive is recognised as /dev/hda and not sdX. Also whenever I go to execute /sbin/lilo after a fresh recompile to try again, no errors pop up, but I have noticed a boot.301 file there. If a delete it, a new one is created as a backup according to lilo.

This system is intended only to run Slackware, so no other filesystems are in place.

Does anyone have any ideas about what might be going wrong?

Thanks

Can you go into your linux kernel source and do:

Edit:
I also notice that the last error you posted is looking at /dev/hda2; but you don't list a hda2 in your partition list. Is the root/boot options in lilo.conf looking in the right spot?

Thank you for your offer of help, but I've finally managed to solve this problem after a lot of reading and searching.

If anyone else has come across this problem, it's to do with this line in your kernel .config file:

CONFIG_PM_STD_PARTITION="/dev/hda2"

It seems to be set by default to /dev/hda2 in kernel 2.6.17.11 at least and you have to change the "/dev/hda2" to whatever is your / (root) drive, in my case /dev/hda1. If you prefer to look through the menus, it is under:

Power management options (ACPI, APM) --> (/dev/hda2) Default resume partition

It's not listed very clearly in my opinion and is very easily missed. I have no idea why it is set like this by default and I'm pretty sure it wasn't in the previous kernels (at least the last kernel I recompiled which was 2.6.15.x)

I'd like to credit the source of this knowledge to this thread:

http://www.linuxquestions.org/questi...d.php?t=463272

Thank you for taking time to explain in detail the solution you found to your problem.
I have been struggling with this exact kernel version, using SATA and reiserfs, so I will try this today as soon as I have time.