Kernel Panic is making me panic

[Rick Stevens]

On 03/02/2012 12:40 PM, Arthur Dent wrote:
> Hello all,
>
> On Feb 29 my Fedora 16 box updated itself (I'm not wild about the only
> options being completely manual update or completely automatic update -
> but that's another story). It must have updated the Kernel because the
> next day when I turned on the PC I had a kernel panic (details below)
> and the machine failed to boot.
>
> I had a zero timeout on grub so this meant that I had to use a Mint
> liveCD to edit grub so that I could try booting with the previous
> kernel.
>
> The fact that I am able to write this shows that the previous kernel on
> the very same machine boots without problem. This is the "previous"
> working kernel:
> $ uname -a
> Linux localhost.localdomain 3.2.6-3.fc16.i686.PAE #1 SMP Mon Feb 13 20:44:23 UTC 2012 i686 i686 i386 GNU/Linux
>
> The kernel that is failing is 3.2.7-1.fc16.i686.PAE
>
> Below I have tried to type as accurately as possible the kernel panic
> message that I get when I try to boot into the new kernel (note It's
> typed manually - NOT copied and pasted - so i might have made the odd
> typo).
>
> What should I do?
>
> I can think of no obvious hardware problem given the fact this the
> machine boots happily with the previous kernel...
>
> Thanks in advance...
>
> Mark
>
> ==========8<=======================================================
>     Booting 'Fedora (3.2.7-1.fc16.i686 PAE)'
>
> Loading Fedora (3.2.7-1.fc16.i686 PAE)
> Loading initial ramdisk ...
> [   2.957551] Kernel panic - not syncing: VFS: Unable to mount root fs
> on unknown-block (0,0)
> [   2.957599] Pid: 1, comm: swapper/o Not tainted 3.2.7-1.fc16.i686.PAE #1
> [   2.957639] Call Trace:
> [   2.957682] [<c0933468>] ? printk +0x2d/0x2f
>      ... another 8 lines similar to this ...
> [   2.957599] [<c0943efe>] kernel_thread_helper +0x6/0x10
> ==========8<=======================================================

Looks like either dracut didn't put the driver you need for your hard
drive in the ramdisk image or the grub configuration is telling it to
use the wrong root partition.  Check the grub config first and make sure
the entry for the faulty kernel has the same root partition as the
working kernel.
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- Rick Stevens, Systems Engineer, AllDigital    ricks at alldigital.com -
- AIM/Skype: therps2        ICQ: 22643734            Yahoo: origrps2 -
-                                                                    -
-       "I'd explain it to you, but your brain might explode."       -
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