Labelling/Partitioning disks - once more with feeling!

Nigel.Metheringham (nigel@theplanet.net)
Thu, 26 Oct 1995 18:33:47 +0100


I'm still hitting problems with disk labels etc. I'm hoping someone
can work out what an earth I'm doing wrong!

Following my earlier investigations I am now partitioning disks (both
IDE and SCSI) with minlabel. All I'm doing with this is making 2
partitions, a big one followed by a little one (normally 85/15 split
of the disk for disk/swap).

I mke2fs the first partition, mkswap the second, put something onto
the disk.

MILO can see the disk and read its contents fine. A kernel started
on their boots fine *until* its gets to the mounting of the root
filesystem stage. Then I get this set of messages:-
[MS-DOS FS Rel. 12, FAT 0, check=n, conv=b, uid=0, gid=0,
umask=022, bmap]
[me=0x0, cs=0, #f=0, fr=0, fl=0, ds=0, de=0, data=0, se=0, ts=0,
ls=0]
Transaction block size=512
Kernel Panic: VFS: Unable to mount root on 03:41

I can mount any of these file systems using mount on a running alpha
system. I have one 1.3.31 kernel acquired by one of my collegues (he
is away having a baby - by proxy - so I can't check where he got it
from). However any kernel I build, and any of the recent binary
distribution kernels I have tried panic on root mount.

However I also have one IDE drive formatted before I took the system
over. This will quite happily work with any kernel I build!!!

I can't track the panic message down in the kernel source - not the
MS-DOS bit anyhow.

I'd *love* any suggestions as to whats happening here!!!

Nigel.

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