Hi, New here, 5.9 light freezing on boot after clean install

[lionellinux]

Hi All,

I just found VL last week and decided to try it last night, I'm using 5.9 light because my hardware is right on the boundary of doorstop/boat anchor.

I have a slight problem on boot, I have re installed three times with different options but each time get an error at the same spot, I wrote it down so will inclue it when I get home from work, but it goes something like   kernel panic unable to mount root(3,1)  i think VSM or something like it is mentioned too then just hangs. I realise that is a bit garbled and am kicking myself for leaving the full written version at home. I have however managed to get the system to boot by using the cd and manually adding the linux root= etc etc and after a lot of thinking it boots, when it is working it is fantastic for my hardware, I am really impressed. I have tried loads of light and cut down distros and honestly this is the best I have found, it detected all my hardware without batting an eyelid and it is usable too, my hardware is an ageing Thinkpad 315ed p166mmx 96mb ram 6gig hd, soon to be a whopping 128 ram just waiting for the chip to arrive, even on these boat anchor specs this system is very usable, I have partioned with hda1 root 5.8gb and a 200meg swap hda2. I have done three complete wipes and install and the same error comes back each time.

Just wondering if anybody recognises this garbled error??

Anyway, well done on what seems to be a cracking distro, I'm now very tempted to try the full soho on my real work horse....


LL

[bigpaws]

It appears to be a lilo error. Lilo is a boot manager.

One usual cause is that the MBR is not giving up what was
in there from before. Did you have another Linux distro
installed?

You can try two things once you get Vector started try looking
at /etc/lilo.conf and make sure everything is correct. If that file
does not exist you can try VASM for lilo.

Bigpaws

[lionellinux]

I initially thought it could be lilo but didnt know where to look, would it make a diference that this is happening up to 30 seconds into the boot process, so after I have had the vector selector screen and made my choice of what to boot the process started and then fell over further down the track ?


I have had many distros installed on the drive but have done a full format each time, deleting the partitions as well, I will check out lilo though

LL

[bigpaws]

The MBR is the first 512 bits.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Master_boot_record

The error you are reporting may also be a bad reference to the root
partition.

A definite error would be helpful. If it is the MBR you can clear it after Vector
is running.

dd if=/dev/zero of=/dev/<drive name>  bs=1 count=446

This will clear the data area of the MBR you can then try to install lilo again.

Bigpaws

[lionellinux]

I haven't checked it all out yet, but error in full is

Kernel panic  not syncing:vfs: unable to mount root fs on unknown block(3,1)


I will check out all the suggestions today

Cheers

LL

[lionellinux]

so,
I checked lilo, it all "seems" to be fine, cleared it and re installed, but no matter what the options every time I install it turns out hosed with the same error, I have even tried a new hd to eliminate a bad drive, still the same error. There are no errors on the install at all, it all comes about on first reboot and all subsequent boots 

[sparkyhall]

I remember having this error doing a hosted install on an IBM T40 with faulty cd drive. From what I remember it was related to the distro I was installing from listing partitions as sda.. and vector expecting hda.. or at least that was my view of the error. I can't for the life of me remember how I fixed it but I thought I would post just in case it gives someone else an idea.

As a last resort you could try installing grub which I think can be done by typing vgrubconf as root in a terminal. I wouldn't try this until others have had a chance to help though.

[lionellinux]

Thanks for that, the other thing I found was the ide kernel boot option from the install cd says it cant find the hard disk so its "outta here". I downloaded and tried the 6.0 beta and tried that, same thing, a humerous message incorrectly informing me I have no hard drive. 

[lagagnon]

Something is wrong with your BIOS, your hard drive or your hard drive partitions. Please drop down to the command line when you bootup the VL install CD, type "fdisk -l" and show us the output of that....

[lionellinux]

I had to attach it, wasnt sure how to copy and paste from command line 

[bigpaws]

Start your Vector machine again. Then open a terminal
as root and type cfdisk.

You can make /dev/hda2 bootable there is an option in the
Options menu.

Then try lilo -v you should see that there is an entry for
Vector now.

Bigpaws

[lionellinux]

All done , still hosed, sorry.

I am wondering 2 things but bearing in mind I probably know less than sweet fa this could be interesting, its either something to do with the fact the ide kernel wont boot at all and it uses the scsi by default, the error seems to point to unable to mount 3,1 which I dont have, OR is the number of heads, cylinders, screwed on my drive, I have not been tampering but I know its do able from fdisk.

I really dont know, I have lilo'd and lilo'd until I'm blue in the face and have no idea...

[nightflier]

Look in /etc/fstab and make sure it correctly references your drive partitions (hdX or sdX).

[bigpaws]

Is  lilo giving any errors when using lilo -v?

Can you paste the output of lilo?

The output of /etc/fstab in reference to /dev/hda1, /dev/hda2, and /dev/hda3

Bigpaws

[lionellinux]

ok, this was in fstab

# The Linux partitions
/dev/hda1 / ext3  defaults  0  1

# Shared Windows/Linux partition
#/dev/hda1   /mnt/dos  msdos  umask=0   0  0
#/dev/hda1   /mnt/win  vfat   fmask=111,dmask=0,quiet,shortname=mixed,user  0  0
#/dev/hda1   /mnt/win  ntfs   umask=0   0  0

# Floppy disks
# The 'noauto' option indicates that the file system should not be mounted
# with 'mount -a' 'user' indicates that normal users are allowed to mount
# the file system.
/dev/fd0   /mnt/floppy   auto   defaults,noauto,user   0 0
#/dev/fd1  /mnt/floppy   auto   defaults,noauto,user   0 0

# If you have a ls-120 floppy drive, it could be on /dev/hda b c d etc.
#/dev/hdd   /mnt/ls120   auto   defaults,noauto,user   0 0

# CDROM, CDWRITER, DVD
/dev/cdrom    /mnt/cdrom   iso9660   defaults,noauto,ro,user   0 0
#/dev/cdwriter /mnt/cdwriter   iso9660   defaults,noauto,rw,user   0 0
#/dev/dvd      /mnt/dvd    auto   defaults,noauto,ro,user   0 0

# NFS file systems:
#linux01.gwdg.de:/suse/6.3/i386.de  /mnt/nfs  nfs  defaults  0 0

# proc file system:
proc   /proc   proc   defaults   0 0

# Unix98 devpts filesystem:
none  /dev/pts  devpts  gid=5,mode=666  0 0

# Shared memory filesystem:
tmpfs   /dev/shm    tmpfs defaults 0  0

# Basic USB filesystem
sysfs  /sys  sysfs  defaults  0 0
usbfs /proc/bus/usb usbfs rw,devmode=0666 0 0

# example of a VFAT USB pendrive
#/dev/sda1  /mnt/pendrive vfat   fmask=111,dmask=0,noauto,user,quiet,shortname=mixed 0 0


# Swap partitions
# The 'sw' option means auto activating with 'swapon -a'.
/dev/hda2   none   swap   sw   0  0



I also included a sreen dump of lilo -v it couldnt fit on the display the top part is missing, something about lba32 i think...