Getting Debian 2.0 to boot on ThinkPad 600

["James G. MacKinnon" <jgm@qed.econ.queensu.ca>]

I have been trying to help a colleague install Debian 2.0 on his ThinkPad
600. Red Hat 5.0 previously installed fine. However, he has been unable to
boot from either the standard Debian 2.0 rescue disk or the Tecra rescue
disk. 

Believing that this is a problem caused by all the extra drivers in the
standard distribution kernels, we have compiled a new kernel on another
machine and replaced the file "linux" on the rescue disk with it. This new
kernel works much better than the original one. The boot process proceeds
for quite some time. However, it eventually dies with the following
messages:

  VFS: mounted root (minix filesystem).
  Kernel panic: VFS: Unable to mount root fs on 03:06.

We suspect that we must have failed to include something essential in the
kernel we compiled, but we don't know what it is. We did include both
RAMdisk and Minix support.

If anyone can shed any light on what we are doing wrong, we would be very
grateful. 

James G. MacKinnon                       Department of Economics
    phone: 613 545-2293                  Queen's University
      Fax: 613 545-2257                  Kingston, Ontario, Canada
    Email: jgm@qed.econ.queensu.ca       K7L 3N6