[ILUG] unable to mount root fs

[Peter Flynn]

My laptop (Hi-Grade Notino, a UK-assembled clone) suddenly decided to
lose sight of its hard disk. At first it ran POST then cleared the
screen and said Cannot boot from Hard Disk. This is a new RH5.2
installation, I've only had it running Linux for a couple of days
(apparently happily) after Win95 died messily and scrambled everything
:-)

I'm a longtime SunOS user, so Linux is new territory for me, and LILO
remains a mystery :-) So...after booting from the rescue floppy, I now
get most of the start-up diagnostics OK, but then:

Partition check:
 hda: hda1 hda2 < hda5 hda6 >
[MS-DOS FS Rel. 12, FAT 0,check=n,conv=b,uid=0,gid=0,umask=022,bmap]
[me=0x0,cs=0,#f=0,fs=0,fl=0,ds=0,de=0,data=0,se=0,ts=0,ls=0,rc=0,fc=4294967295]
Transaction block size = 512
Kernel panic: VFS: Unable to mount root fs on 03:05

I've delved into some of the rescue pages around the Web, but no-one
seems to have had this before (hard to believe) as in all cases I've
seen, they do still have access to some of the partitions. Tomsrtbt
doesn't seem to provide anything useful. One message off BALUG did
have a user suggest replacing the MBR with the DOS one just to get it
to recognise the disk, and the "re-run" LILO (how you do this is
unexplained). 

It's not disastrous, just I had got 99% of stuff set up the way I
wanted, plus 60Mb of rescued data off the Win95 system (which I had
zipped elsewhere) unpacked and put into place, so I'd like to be able
to recover it if possible so I can ftp it to another machine for
safety :-)

However...this failure to boot from the hard disk was what triggered
me into replacing the W95 installation with Linux. If it turns out
that this is a hardware fault, then obviously I'm in the market for a
new machine (although to be fair the Notino _hardware_ has been
extremely reliable for the last 3 years), so in that case any
recommendations for a suitable laptop to run Linux would be gratefully
received.

///Peter