Re: Problems booting with 2.1.116 (+2.1.115) and 2.0.35

Vladimir Dergachev (vladimid@seas.upenn.edu)
Wed, 19 Aug 1998 16:15:02 -0400 (EDT)


What are the arguments you are giving to lilo or loadlin ?
It looks like you have MS-DOS or Win 95 installed somewhere
and you are trying to mount their partition as root one.
Of course there is no init process there and Linux gives up.
Have you changed disks lately ?

Vladimir Dergachev

>
> 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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