Problems booting with 2.1.116 (+2.1.115) and 2.0.35

Lars Erik Kolden (l.e.kolden@hfstud.uio.no)
Wed, 19 Aug 1998 16:37:03 +0200

After about a week of frustration, I decided to check if this
mailing-list could help me. I am running redhat 5.1 with all errata's
applied (except the latest initscripts, which I had to deinstall since
they didn't work with 2.0.34) on a i586 MMX 233 cpu, asus tx-97X
motherboard with matrox millenium video, 128 RAM, two hdds (Quantum ST
4.3 as master, Quantum SE8.4 as slave) and a NEC cdrom. I also use a
3Com 3C905 isa ethernet card, adaptec ava 1502AE scsi host adapter and a
soundblaster awe 64. I guess all this information isn't necessary, but
just to make sure:) On my parallell port I've got an iomega zip drive
and a printer. All these devices, except the adaptec scsi host card,
I've made work (or rather Redhat made work) with Redhat's standard
2.0.34-6 kernel, but it goes wrong as soon as I start upgrading the
kernel.

The first problem occured when I tried to apply redhat's kernel errata,
2.0.35-2. I followed their instructions (I've done it several times),
but when I tried to boot with the new kernel, it stopped, with this
message:

Unable to load NLS charset (nls_cp437)
VFS: Mounted root (msdos filesystem) readonly
Trying to unmount old root... okay
Unable to open initial console.

What is strange is in the second line; why would it want to mount root
as msdos filesystem??? I checked the kernel with rdev, and it was set
right; to /dev/hdb5. I also tried to build the kernel (official release,
not redhat's), but this made no difference to this, except that it
managed to load the nls charset.

So, in all my desperation I thought I should try another kernel:
2.1.115. I made mrproper, xconfig, dep, clean, zImage, modules and
modules_install + made a new initrd, edited /etc/lilo.conf, ran lilo and
rebooted. Here is the message I now got when I booted:

Kernel panic: VFS: Unable to mount root fs on 03:45

I did a ls -l /dev/* > list and found that 03:45 was /dev/ttyrd. What
was the kernel doing there??? Again I checked with rdev, and the image
was set to /dev/hdb5, which is 03:69 (I don't quite know what these
things stand for yet, I am a newbie, I guess. I also tried to compile
the kernel without modules, but this had the same result.

Now, I gave up untill I saw that 2.1.116 was out, and decided to give it
another go. I did a new xconfig and all that, but now I used bzdisk
without modules (was too large for zdisk) just to make sure it booted on
a floppy. But, of course, it didn't. Here is the new message:

Partition check:
sda: sda4
hda: hda1 hda2 < hda5 >
hdb: hdb1 hdb2 < hdb5 > hdb3 < hdb6 hdb7 hdb8 hdb9 hdb10 hdb11 >
VFS: Mounted root (msdos filesystem) readonly.
Freeing unused kernel memory: 48K freed.
Warning: unable to open initial console.
Kernel panic: No init found. Try passing init= option to kernel.

Actually I got this message once with 2.1.115 also, when I built the
kernel without modules.

I hope I have supplied enough information for someone to help me. I
really would like to get the system working either with 2.0.35 or newer
kernel.

Lars Erik Kolden
l.e.kolden@hfstud.uio.no

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