Kernel panic on new Debian 6.01 install

[Lennart Sorensen]

On Tue, Apr 05, 2011 at 02:31:26AM -0400, 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.

Linux can, but older IDE controllers only have LBA28, which limits them
to 137GB.  You need an IDE controller with LBA48 or LBA64 support to
handle larger than that.

My A7N8X-E-DX board which is possibly slightly newer than that gained
LBA48 through a BIOS upgrade.  It used to have the LBA28 limits.  So it's
always worth checking for a BIOS update.  The other option is an add in
PCI IDE controller that supports larger drives.

> 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)'
> 
> Google returns 50 different causes and 50 different solutions.

-- 
Len Sorensen
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