Re: Kernel panic : VFS : unable to mount root fs
On Sat, Oct 26, 2002 at 04:56:56AM -0700, Johan en Katrien Dewaele wrote:
> Hi people,
> I need your help/advice on this one : I'm a newbie in
> this PPC-Linux thing.
>
> I acquired this old Mac PPC 4400/200 with 1.2 GB HD
> with Mac OS 7.5.3 installed on it. Would like to put
> Debian/GNU Linux - Woody on this machine AND would
> like to keep the Mac OS + installed software.
>
> So I plugged in a second HD of 4.3 GB as slave on
> first IDE intending to place Linux on this disk. CD
> is master on second IDE. (Similar as on my intel-PC)
>
> Used floppies and downloaded-base-tarball to install
> (version 3.0.23 ). I partitioned second HD :
> hdb1= partition table
> hdb2= Linux system (2 GB)
> hdb3= swap 160 (MB)
> hdb4= free for now
>
>
> Debian-installer goes OK until I want to make the
> system bootable :
>
> - first I choose make bootable from HD (wanting to use
> quik) : Error : root must be on the first disk.
> - second I choose make boot-floppy : boot floppies
> can't be made.
> - third I choose reboot system : installed BootX on
> the Mac OS partition, copied linux.bin in the
> BootX-kernel-map, choose /dev/hdb2 as root-device and
> choose Linux as OS.
>
> So when I now try to boot using this
> BootX-configuration: kernel boots, the 2 HD + CD are
> detected, partition check goes ok but when the kernel
> wants to mount root fs I get following error :
> Kernel panic: VFS: Unable to mount root fs on 03:40.
> Rebooting in 180 seconds.
>
> I relaunched the installer with the floppies and here
> I CAN mount /dev/hdb2 on /target.
>
> What am I missing? Are there any other kernel
> parameters I should add ?
Thanks for applying all the wisdom available in the manual and so on
before writing!
The make a boot floppy step does not work at all in the installer for
powerpc. You can use a perl script to modify your boot floppy image,
though, to substitute /dev/hdb for the ramdisk root:
http://cvs.debian.org/powerpc-specials/miBoot/patch-floppy-image.pl
Or you can use ResEdit under MacOS to patch the System file, in the
cmdl resource - that would be on an actual floppy.
Another option is to make a small (say 80MB) partition on your master
drive to serve as your root partition, leaving /var, /usr, and /home
on the other disk. Then apparently quik will be happy.
But with your current setup, it's apparent that it's only the file
system it's having a problem with; BootX has suceessfully launched
linux, and the partitions are correctly detected. So it seems unlikely
another booting system will help that. One thing to try is to just run
e2fsck /dev/hdb from within the installer shell.
--
*------v--------- Installing Debian GNU/Linux 3.0 --------v------*
| <http://www.debian.org/releases/stable/installmanual> |
| debian-imac: <http://debian-imac.sourceforge.net> |
| Chris Tillman tillman@voicetrak.com |
| To Have, Give All to All (ACIM) |
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