Kernel panic on new Debian 6.01 install

[Anthony de Boer]

Thomas Milne wrote:
> I've installed Debian 6.01a on an old P3, mainly just to use a large
> IDE drive I have laying around. Is there some kind of maximum drive
> size for these old Pentium 3 motherboards? It's a 500GB drive, but I
> thought Linux could handle any size.

I've got a PIII Coppermine with a 500 gig IDE drive, and it's been
running no problem.  Mine is running Gentoo, though.

> The install seemed to finish fine, but every time I boot up I get an
> error like so 'VFS: Unable to mount root fs on unknown-block (0,0)'

Sounds like it's getting the kernel, so it and the bootstrap are ok, but
it's missing a root filesystem, which could be either the initramfs (or
initrd, if that Debian's older (I don't track Debian releases)), or the
runtime root fs on the drive itself.  Is LVM involved?  Does the grub
config have the right name for the root device?  This is the sort of
issue that separates the sysadmins from the end users.

-- 
Anthony de Boer
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