Re: your mail

[charles kaufman <chuck@grinder.acc.uri.edu>]

Hello

On Tue, 29 Jun 1999, [ Kaa ]@murphy.debian.org@hotmail.com wrote:

> Regarding
>   "kernel panic:VFS:Unable to mount root fs on 03:03"
> 
> Are you sure you are not having BIOS/disk geometry problems? AFAIK with 
> certain BIOSes the Linux root partition must be within the first 1024 
> cylinders (typically, first 512Mb) of the hard disk, otherwise problems 
> appear. Since your first partition is DOS, the root partition may be outside 
> of that zone. This is basically a BIOS problem. Consult the LargeDisk HOWTO 
> for exhaustive detail.

Thanks for the hint. Of course I don't know whether it's a BIOS disk
geometry problem. In fact fdisk says the disk has 1027 cylinders.
But it reports hda1 (dos) is 1 to 64, hda2 (linux) is 65 to 192,
 and hda3(linux swap) is 193 to 205. That's beyond 512 MB but
well within 1024 cylinders.

However lilo works fine and the kernel boots fine. The trouble only
comes late in the startup process, after the partition check-which gives
the results it should-when it insists on trying to mount / on 03:03
while lilo and rdev and fstab all (seem to) have been told that the
 root device is hda2 not hda3. 


I appreciate the help. Thanks
Chuck Kaufman