[SWLUG] Kernel panic - not syncing: VFS: unable to mount root fs on unknown-block(3, 8)

[Justin Mitchell]

On Fri, 2006-03-31 at 20:24 +0100, Julian Hall wrote:
> Kernel panic - not syncing: VFS: unable to mount root fs on
> unknown-block(3, 8)

"unable to mount root" means simply that it couldnt find your root (/)
partition to mount it and continue booting.

so either you have the config wrong and its looking in the wrong place,
or the filesystem has been damaged.
 
it would suggest you had a missing/broken root=/dev/hda? section in your
lilo.conf

another possibility, i dont know if this still applies, but what program
did you use to partition the drive? i had several incidents a few years
back where if the drive was partition by linux then windows was
installed, that windows would overwrite its partition and trash the
neighbouring linux one, the fix at the time was to create the windows
partition using windows own fdisk program, install windows, then add the
rest of the partitions with linux.