Re: 2.6.16-2-686 not booting: Waiting for root filesystem

[Kent West <westk@acu.edu>]

Peter Thomassen wrote:
> Hello,
>
> I helped a friend of mine with installing Debian by phone, that's why my
> diagnostic possibilities are shortened.
>
> After downloading the stable netinst CD, we installed sarge (using Kernel
> 2.4.27 or so). Then, we modified sources.list to use testing in the future
> and did an apt-get dist-upgrade. Afterwards, we installed
> linux-image-2.6.16-2-686 to make his touchpad run. When booting to 2.6.16,
> the following message appears before dropping into a shell after some
> minutes: "Begin: Waiting for root filesystem".
>   
What filesystem was used? ext2,3, reiser, etc

What are the partitions on the drive?

Is the shell it drops into a regular VT bash shell, or something else? 
Once there, is the file system properly mounted as you'd expect?

I assume he has a Pentium-style processor, and not an AMD, etc.

You imply he's using grub as the boot loader; it might help to see his 
menu.lst file.

--
Kent