Kernel panic on new Debian 6.01 install

[Thomas Milne]

On Tue, Apr 5, 2011 at 12:49 PM, Lennart Sorensen
<lsorense-1wCw9BSqJbv44Nm34jS7GywD8/FfD2ys at public.gmane.org> wrote:
> 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.

Would that be reflected in the boot process? The reason I ask is that
during boot, the BIOS detects a '500 GB' hd. Would it show that if the
controllers were limited as you describe?

> 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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