Kernel panic on new Debian 6.01 install

[Thomas Milne]

On Tue, Apr 5, 2011 at 9:11 AM, Anthony de Boer <adb-SACILpcuo74 at public.gmane.org> wrote:
> 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.
>

You got that right, I don't even know how to answer what you asked
except that I did not choose to use LVM during the install. I could
find where the grub config was, I guess, if I could get the machine to
boot ;)

I don't have a live-cd, I'll download one of those and see if I can
get in that way.

First time this has ever happened with Debian...makes me suspect my hardware.


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