Kernel panic: VFS: Unable to mount root fs on 03:01

[Ken Moffat]

On Tue, 11 Nov 2003, Paul Sutherland wrote:

> Hey,
>    I'm really new to Linux in general.  I went through the Linux From
> Scratch 4.0 book as closely as I could.  The only exception was that I
> don't have another Linux partition installed.  Instead I used Knoppix
> and booted from the CD.  Since "8.4 Making The System Bootable" was
> geared toward people who are installing LFS on a different partition, I
> am not sure if I did that right.  Well, anyways, when I rebooted LFS for
> the first time, I got the error:
>
>        kmod: failed to exec /sbin/modprobe -s -k block-major-3, errno = 2

 At a guess, you've tried to use modules for the root filesystem ?
(block major 3 is hda and friends, as seen from the next line.)

>        VFS: Cannot open root device "301" or 03:01
>        Please append correct "root=" boot option
>        Kernel panic: VFS: Unable to mount root fs on 03:01
>
> Does anyone know what this means or how to go about solving it?  Thanks
> for your help
>

 You've got to build the root filesystem type (ext2, ext3, whatever)
into the kernel, not as a module.  (For this list, I'll ignore
using an initrd to hold the modules you need for booting,
because tht is a different can of worms.) Assuming that your rootfs, or
'/', is on hda1, of course.

Ken
-- 
Will code payroll for food.