[NTLUG:Discuss] Boot & Root disks

George E. Lass George.Lass at osc.com
Tue Oct 24 17:38:55 CDT 2000


I need help with a kernel panic that I am encountering when
trying to load a compressed root file system from my floppy
drive.  I am actually trying to build a set of custom "rescue"
disks consisting of a boot disk & a root disk.  The boot disk
was made as follows:

# copy the kernel image
dd if=/boot/vmlinuz-2.0.36-0.7 of=/dev/fd0 bs=1k
# set the root device as the floppy drive
rdev /dev/fd0 /dev/fd0
# allow read & write access to the root device
rdev -R /dev/fd0 0
# tell the kernel that the root fs is on a second disk
rdev -r /dev/fd0 0xc0

The root disk consists of selected files and libraries on a
small spare hard drive partition.  The unmounted partition
was gzip'ed and dd'd out to a second floppy.

Once the boot disk is loaded it responds with:

VFS: Insert root floppy and press ENTER

After changing the floppy and pressing enter I get:

[MS-DOS FS Rel. 12, FAT 12, check=n, conv=b, uid=0, gid=0, umask=022,
bmap]
[me=0x49,cs=496,#f=198,fs=21620,fl=47912,ds=33020,de=28615,data=34808,se=29906,ts=-766205458,ls=2461,rc=0,fc=4294967295]
Transaction block size = 512
Kernel Panic: VFS: Unable to mount root fs on 02:00


Any ideas on what is wrong here?

George

-- 
... Unix IS a user friendly O/S ...
(It's just picky about its friends)

--- ANYTHING FOLLOWING THIS LINE IS NOT THE RESPONSIBILITY OF THE AUTHOR
---



More information about the Discuss mailing list