[ILUG] Kernel panic

[Wesley Darlington]

Howdy,

On Fri, May 11, 2001 at 09:00:34AM +0100, Eamonn Shinners wrote:
> 	small / large problem. I've recompiled a kernel for a guy with a Dell 2450 
> running RH6.2, kernel is 2.2.14. The box has 2 x 18.2Gb hard drives connected 

2.2.14 seems a bit ... vintage. Consider 2.2.18 (or .19, even.)

> to an Adaptec AIC-7899 scsi card, and they are not mounted as a RAID set.

Does the aic7xxx driver in 2.2.14 even support this scsi card correctly?

> 	As far as I know, the /boot and / dirs are both below the 1024 cylinder 

It's scsi - I don't think the 1024 thing matters.

> limit. When setup from the CD, it works fine, but with the recompiled kernel 
> I get the following message at boot;
> 
> 	Partition check:
> 	request_module[block-major-8]: Root fs not mounted
> 	VFS: Cannot open root device 08:06
> 	Kernel panic : VFS : Unable to mount root fs on 08:06

It's trying to mount /dev/sda6 as its root partition. And it can't. Either
/dev/sda6 isn't the root partition (in which case you should `rdev' the
kernel, or suggest a root parition to lilo, perhaps in lilo.conf) or it
doesn't have a driver for the root partition...

> I have compiled the aic-7xxx module, and done make modules, etc., etc.

...which looks like the problem. I take it the modules are on this root
partition of which we speak ... As soon as it's mounted the root partition,
it'll be able to load the aic7xxx driver. And vice versa... :-)

> The / is /dev/sda6, sorry, I can't remember the rest of the setup.

Ah, well that's ok then. 

Compile aic7xxx in as not-a-module. Or investigate the joys of initial
ramdisks. But better not to compile aic7xxx as a module - make it a
real part of the kernel.

ATB,
Wesley.