booting from Floppy with Kernel 2.6.4 : Kernel panic

This appears as there is no file system driver for the root file system, or there is no usable file system on /dev/hda2.

Which file system do you have on /dev/hda2?

Looks like your hda2 is an extended partition, so hda1, hda5 or hda6 should be your root fs. If you can boot from a rescue cd or floppy, it would be nice to see the output of "fdisk -l /dev/hda".

Trygve.

Hi and thanks to Tauno (Kitos Tauno)

I don't know much about filesystems yet. On the PC I mentioned there is a WIN98 installed. I guess with a standard installation this should be a FAT. On the Laptop I have a Windows XP and on a second partition there is the SuSe 9.1 Linux. However I put the GRUB on a floppy due to some warnings from a colleague, that my current fedora core has a bug in the bootmanager making the MBR invalid and the Windows partition invisible. Shouldn't the Kernel on my syslinux floppy be able to access a partition for WIN98 (I guess with FAT fs)? For first steps with little programs/applications, is it possible to remove all mass storage drivers except the ramdisk in the menuconfig to avoid the kernel panic?

TIA Hans-Joerg

Hi Trygve

Im lucky I have a fedore rescue cd. Here you are (table from my laptop with the GRUB on a floppy):

Device Boot Start End Blocks Id System /dev/hda1 * 1 53045 26734648+ 7 HPFS/NTFS /dev/hda2 55001 77520 11350080 83 Linux /dev/hda3 53046 55000 985320 83 Linux

I hope you will have the "now its obvious" effect.

TIA Hans-Jörg

Windows98 will run on a FAT filesystem (probably FAT32). Linux knows the extended FAT filesystem of Windows95 and up as VFAT.

XP is pretty probably on a NTFS filesystem. Linux can read it, but writing is unsafe at its best due to the fact that Microsoft has not released the specifications and they are constantly being changed.

In this case, it's possible that the kernel on the floppy does not know the correct root partition. If you know it, you can give it as a root= kernel paremeter, e.g. root=/dev/hda3.

One of the easiest ways to get at the correct partitions is to boot a live CD (e.g. Knoppix) and see what partitions it finds. You should pretty easily find the partition with root filesystem-like names in it.

HTH

(Tschuess)

Hi,

This can't be right. Your kernel says "hda1 hda2 " while your listing says hda1, hda2 and hda3. Are you sure this is the same disk?

Trygve.

Hi Tauno

Thanks for your suggestions. If I would have read my tutorial book right deep in the night, I would have seen that after putting the bzImage on the floppy the kernel will panic because it lacks the parameters from syslinux.cfg, im sorry. I did not mention, that I plan to boot a pc target over a nfs to gather some experience in embedded developping, thus my tutorial describes the syslinux.cfg as follows:

timeout 0 append root=/dev/nfs ip=bootp

Therefore I will not further follow up this subject. However I stuck with new problems considering the bootp server. I will post a new subject for this. Hope you like to help me with this new subject.

PS: How did you make the compressed short form of your posting with the hyperlink to expand it?

Thanks Hans-Joerg

Hi Trygve,

This table was from my notebook, that reported the same problem as the PC with hda1 hda2 , sorry for the confusion. I will not follow up further this subject as you can read in my last posting for Tauno. But now I have a new problem to set up a bootp server to get the root fs for the kernel over nfs, if you like to help me, I will post a new subject for this.

TIA Hans-Joerg

Have you read the Diskless-HOWTO's in the Linux Documentation Project? Most distributions include the HOWTO's, and the root URL of the Project is . Please use the mirror nearest you, mine is .

I did not do anything special - just plain text. Maybe your newsreader is smart enough to handle such things.