Kernel panic on first boot in fedora 3

[John Swartzentruber]

On 11/21/2004 10:06 AM Neil Marjoram wrote:

> Can you tell me what kernel version you were using ?

The problem was with the original (667).  After I had it working, when 
the update came through, it worked fine for me without any 
modifications. I think the problem was that the installer (when 
updating) messed up modprobe.conf and didn't have some required stuff in 
it, but that's a mostly uneducated guess.

>
> I have the same problem, but only with kernel version : 
> kernel-2.6.9-1.678_FC3
> The original (667) works out of box with no problems and I have a SATA 
> drive installed.
>
> Thanks,
>
> Neil,
>
>
> John Swartzentruber wrote:
>
>> On 11/16/2004 5:03 PM Alexandre Van Haecke wrote:
>>
>>> Hi all,
>>> I've just downloaded and installed Fedora 3 x86_64 on an nforce 3 board
>>> with an Athlon 64 socket 939 and a SATA disk (important detail)
>>> As far as I could tell installation went well but upon reboot I got the
>>> fatal message when selecting fedora at the grub prompt :
>>> [...]
>>> ata2 failed to respond (30 secs)
>>> mkrootdev: label /1 not found
>>> mount: error 2 mounting ext3
>>> mount: error 2 mounting none
>>> switchroot: mount failed: 22
>>> umount /initrd/dev failed: 2
>>> Kernel panic - not syncing: Attempted to kill init!
>>>
>>> And that's it...
>>> I can boot in rescue mode ("linux rescue" at boot prompt ) and mount 
>>> the file system in rescue mode.
>>> With Fedora 2 and the latest kernels (2.6.8) I had somewhat similar 
>>> problems (same architecture exactly).
>>> With Fedora 2, I got the following message at boot :
>>>
>>> Kernel Panic : VFS  Unable  to mount root fs on unknown-block (0, 0)
>>>
>>> To be precise, my system worked fine with Fedora 2 and kernel 
>>> 2.6.5-1.358 (and yes options in grub.conf were the same in fedora 2).
>>>
>>> Thus, my main questions are to the fedora list : what can I do 
>>> (through kernel recompile, or grub.conf options)or whatever) to 
>>> adress the issue ?
>>> Any suggestion is welcome...
>>>
>>> Alexandre
>>>
>>>  
>>>
>> I posted the exact same problem last week. Then I answered myself. 
>> Let me see if I can dig that up. Here it is. I hope it helps:
>>
>> [11/11/2004]
>>
>> The main problem appears to be that support for the SATA hardware 
>> wasn't being loaded in the initrd. When I created a new image using 
>> mkinitrd with "--with=sata_via", I got past the initial kernel panic 
>> and the system booted.
>>
>> Or mostly. Unfortunately, it eventually had lots of IRQ 10 errors and 
>> then died. At some point (correct or not), I copied my old 
>> /etc/modprobe.conf file back to the current one, which didn't seem to 
>> have much of anything in it. I also added "acpi=off" to my  kernel 
>> line in /etc/grub.conf. The latter seems to have allowed eth0 to work 
>> again. While running in single user mode without the network (this 
>> was actually before I tried acpi=off), I made a CD-RW disc with the 
>> new udev rpm and updated that.
>>
>> It looks like the system is mostly working now. I'm running yum 
>> update, which is taking awhile to get all of the updates. Then I'll 
>> start figuring out whether everything is really working and try to 
>> see what the implications of "acpi=off" really are. It clearly solves 
>> a big problem, but does it cause other problems?
>>
>>
>> [back to the present day]
>>
>> I'm a real newbie, so I hope that makes sense. The gist of it is that 
>> you need to create a new image that contains the SATA stuff. It seems 
>> to not be included by default because the modprobe.conf is missing 
>> stuff it shouldn't be.
>>
>