[Sderby] Kernel Panic: VFS: Unable to mount root FS on 21:03

[Andrew White]

>  I've bought a copy of Suse Linux v8.1 pro. I have loaded it and now when
> booting it hangs on an error:-
> Kernel Panic: VFS: Unable to mount root FS on 21:03

linux device majro 21 is generic scsi access, and from what I read later
on, I guess you don't have any scsi drives available at this point in
time... ?

> The machine I loaded is a Dual P III 800 the Hard Drives are mounted on a
> pci Raid card (100 udma) instead of the on board IDE ports (UDMA66).

right, you'll need to check which way round these are detected by the
kernel and/or the bios. I think the bios will probably decide the order here.

[snip]

> Next Attempt
> Disconnected IDE drives, unplugged pci Raid card.
>
> Installed SCSI  Hard Drive
>
> (Initial attempts at Suse install ended with not System Disk failure) so
>
> Formatted and made bootable
> Ran SUSE 8.1 Installation - This time boot OK!
>
> Error
>
> KMOD: failed to exec /sbin /modprobe -s -k block major-8 errno=2

ok, this is trying to load a block-mode driver, for major 8 (which
is, indeed, the scsi disk device drivers)

> VFS: cannot open root device "sda3"
> Please append a correct "root=" boot option
> Kernel Panic: VFS: Unable to mount root FS on 08:03

hmm, do you acutally have a fs on partition 3 on sda? Is your scsi
card actually being recognised at all? I'm guessing it is, otherwise
you'd probably see  something along the lines of 'unknown device'
rather than 'cannot open....'

Can you boot a "rescue kernel" at all, and check /proc/pci for your
scsi and/or raid cards?

and then try fdisk -l /dev/sda or fdisk -l /dev/hda ?

There's not really enough info here to suggest a solution straight off

Andy