On Sun, 14 Nov 2004, Kent West wrote: > Dan Davison wrote: > > >Any help with the following would be much appreciated: I was attempting to > >update a kernel from 2.2.20 to 2.6.8 and it seems now that neither of the > >kernel links in the lilo menu will boot. Both exit with the same kernel > >panic message and the output up to that point appears to be identical. > >This output makes mention of NTFS drivers, ACPI, powerNOW and other things > >that I believe mean I'm looking at output from the 2.6.8 kernel. I think > >I've somehow managed to point both the links in lilo at the new kernel. Is > >there anything that can be done, short of reinstalling debian from CD (and > >presumably losing all data that way?) > > > > > Yes, you can recover without reinstalling, but sometimes it's hard to > diagnose remotely. > > Also, as an aside, if you have separate partitions for your /home (and > possibly others), a reinstallation doesn't hurt you so bad. If it comes > down to a reinstall and you don't have a separate partition for /home, > you can boot off a Knoppix CD and backup your data to a network share, > USB device, CD-ROM, etc. > > >The exit error message is (after some stuff mentioning ACPI) : > >.... > >VFS: Cannot open root device "305" or unknown-block(3,5) > >Please append a correct "root=" boot option > >Kernel panic: VFS: Unable to mount root fs on unknown-block(3,5) > > > >More details: > > > >I obtained 2.6.8 kernel source via apt-get and included support for EXT3 > >filesystem, changed the processor type to AMD Athlon, NTFS support, SCSI > >emulation, ACPI and processor clock scaling in menuconfig. I made a .deb > >with make-kpkg and installed it with dpkg -i. I answered yes to the > >question resulting from dpkg -i about making modifications to lilo so that > >the new kernel would be available to boot. After this I checked that > >/vmlinuz was pointing at the new kernel and looked at /etc/lilo.conf. The > >"label" for the stanza associated with the /vmlinuz link said > >"Linux_2.6.6" (a previous kernel installation failure) > > > > This makes me think the installation of your new kernel was not properly > completed for some reason. > > > and I changed the > >text of the label to "linux_2.6.8", but nothing else in /etc/lilo.conf. > >After this modification to /etc/lilo.conf I ran lilo, which added the > >various boot options OK, but produced a warning message that I did not > >understand containing the word block and some memory addresses. Since I > >believed that the old 2.2.20 link would be OK to boot, I proceeded to > >power down and try to boot the new kernel, with the above-described > >failure. > > > >This is on an HP Athlon laptop. > > > > > > I believe what I would do is boot off a Knoppix CD (or similar) and > manually mount the / directory rw (as necessary), redo the symlinks to > get /vmlinuz to point to your older working 2.2 kernel, reconfigure > /etc/lilo.conf accordingly, then run "chroot /whereverrootismounted", > run "lilo", "exit", and "reboot". Hopefully this will give you a working > 2.2 system, from whence you can repair what's wrong with your 2.6 kernel > and try again.
OK thanks a lot for helpful advice (Kent and other two repliers). Knoppix is downloaded and running. One current problem: I haven't got to run lilo under knoppix, because it won't recognise the location of the boot partition (specified as /dev/hda3 in lilo.conf). I have mounted and changed write permissions on the hda3 icon on the knoppix desktop. I used the chroot /mnt/hda5 command as suggested above by Kent. It seemed logical to me that I'd therefore want hda3 mounted at /mnt/hda5/dev/hda3, but I couldn't get that to happen. It seems that knoppix mounts hda3 at the "ramdisk" by default. How do I set things up so that I can record a new boot block according to my modified lilo.conf? Dan > > -- > Kent > > > -- > To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] > with a subject of "unsubscribe". Trouble? Contact [EMAIL PROTECTED] > -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with a subject of "unsubscribe". Trouble? Contact [EMAIL PROTECTED]
