Re: Kernelpanic - not syncing: VFS: Unable to mount root fs onunknown-block

[Chris Gorman]

Hello All,

First off, I am not on the linux-kernel list so please cc me directly on
this if anyone has a solution.  I've experienced a very similar problem
as S S did while upgrading from 2.6.11.6 to 2.6.11.7.  Essentialy grub
will boot 2.6.11.6 without any problems, but using the same command line
2.6.11.7 fails to boot with "Cannot open root device hde6 or
unknown-block(0,0)".  The config file used was the same one as 2.6.11.6 so
I doubt I missed a config option.

The reason I chose to upgrade was because I've been getting ext3 errors
which caused the journal to crash and the filesystem to be remounted
read-only.  I hoped the following referenced patch would resolve it.

[PATCH] Prevent race condition in jbd

From: Stephen Tweedie <sct@xxxxxxxxxx>
Subject: Prevent race condition in jbd

This patch from Stephen Tweedie which fixes a race in jbd code (it
demonstrated itself as more or less random NULL dereferences in
the journal code).

Acked-by: Jan Kara <jack@xxxxxxx>
Acked-by: Chris Mason <mason@xxxxxxxx>
Signed-off-by: Chris Wright <chrisw@xxxxxxxx>
Signed-off-by: Greg Kroah-Hartman <gregkh@xxxxxxx>

I only see a few other patches in the Changelog and none appear to me to
be fs relevant.  Could this be part of our problem?  I've seen one other
post "Re: Linux 2.6.12-rc2" by hubert.tonneau@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx which
describes the same symptom.  The problem occured during an upgrade from
2.6.11 to 2.6.12-rc[12] and this person does have ext3 compiled in.

Also, since grub is common between myself and S S, and my grub is a little
old, I will try upgrading the program in case that is the problem.

TIA

Chris Gorman

On Apr 18, 2005 S S wrote:
> I compiled linux kernel 2.6.11.7 on RHEL and while
> rebooting I get this
> error message -
>
> Cannot open root device /SCSIGroup00/SCSIVol000
> Please append a correct "root=" boot option
> Kernelpanic - not syncing: VFS: Unable to mount root
> fs on
> unknown-block 0,0
>
> This root entry in grub .conf is identical to kernel
> image entry 2.6.9 which boots fine. However 2.6.11.7
> compiled kernel does not find
> /dev//SCSIGroup00/SCSIVol000
>
> Could anyone please suggest what could be going wrong.

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