[lug] "Kernal panic:"

[Aaron Crane]

Ralph Slutz <ralphs at bouldernews.infi.net> writes:
> I have Red Hat 6.0 installed.
> When firing it up, after a couple of pages I received,
>     "VFS: Cannot open root device 16:42
>     "Kernel panic: VFS: Unable to mount root fs on 16:42"
> Then it froze.
> CtrAltDel gave, "Stopping all mp device"
> and sent me back to bootup.
> 
> (The time was not 16:42, but 17:05)

The 16:42 is not a time, but a device id, specified in hexadecimal.  It
turns out that 16:42 is major 22, minor 66, which is /dev/hdd2.  This means
that your system thinks the root filesystem is /dev/hdd2, but the kernel
can't find that device (or possibly, that it can't find a filesystem on that
device).

If you know what your root filesystem is, then you should pause LILO when it 
starts, and type "linux root=..." where the "..." is whatever device you
need.  For example, if your root filesystem is on the second partition of
the first IDE disk, you can say "linux root=/dev/hda2".

-- 
Aaron Crane   <aaron.crane at pobox.com>   <URL:http://pobox.com/~aaronc/>