[Techtalk] kernel panic

[Jeff Dike]

wendy at scottishmusician.com said:
> On Friday 17 August 2001 22:10, Ray306 at aol.com wrote:
> > I'm having a problem with starting my Linux distro on 1 of my
> > machines. I have Mandrake dual booted with Win98 and the Win 98 boots just 
> > fine. When I boot into Linux I get
> > kernel panic: VFS: unable to mount root fs on 3:02 
>
> I couldn't tell you what the exact message was, but it was similar to
> yours,  in that the system essentially couldn't find the hard drive.
> My system isn't  dual boot though, so I couldn't even guess why W98
> would boot, but not Linux.

Are Win98 and Lilo both on hda?  If so, then it doesn't sound like a problem
with the disk itself.  Everything you've said is consistent with there really
not being a valid ext2 filesystem on that partition.

Have you booted Linux from hda2 successfully?  If so, what did you do just
before it stopped working?

Here are some more esoteric possibilities:

you moved that partition around, so, while there's an ext2 filesystem on
the disk, it doesn't begin where the partition table says it should

your root filesystem isn't ext2 (maybe reiserfs) and that filesystem isn't
compiled into the kernel

				Jeff