I've got an old (IBM Thinkpad 760EL) laptop. It won't boot from CD, and I don't have a floppy drive. So, I got an adapter, and hooked up the hard drive in a SuSE 9.2 system. I partitioned the 2GB drive into a 250MB swap partition (hdc2) and a 1.5GB root (hdc1). I formatted the root with reiserfs (default options), ran mkswap on the swap partition, and mounted the root on /mnt. Then I fired up Yast and did the install to directory thing, checking the "run yast on startup to detect hardware" option. I essentially did a "basic with KDE" install, with the thinkpad utils and a few other things added. Then I installed grub to the drive with grub-install --root-directory=/mnt /dev/hdc I forgot to write a grub.conf, but I figured that'd be fine, I'm relatively comfortable with grub's command line. I replaced the drive in the laptop, and fired it up. I got dumped to a grub prompt, as expected. I type root, and it says that it's using (hd0,0), which is correct, AFAIK. It's the only hard drive in the system. Then I type kernel /boot/vmlinuz root=/dev/hda1 which grub recognizes as a linux bzimage, and I then type "boot". The kernel loads, and then hangs where it should be mounting the root filesystem. It says "Kernel panic - not syncing: VFS: Unable to mount root fs on unknown-block(3,1)". A few lines up, it recognizes the hard drive as an IBM ATA disk drive, and sees that hda has 2 partitions, hda1 and hda2. The geometry agrees with what's printed on the drive itself. I've tried specifying an initrd (the one in /boot) with grub, too, and there's the same problem, though the kernel does say that it found a ramdisk before it hangs on the root filesystem. Now, using grub's tab completion, I can see that the device nodes /dev/hda1 and /dev/pts are where they should be. The root filesystem is fine. What I'm wondering is, does the default 9.2 kernel not have reiserfs support? That seems very odd, especially for SuSE. Did I miss something else? I think I did everything required for making a drive bootable, but maybe I missed a step that someone outside the situation can see? I'd appreciate any debugging steps that I'm missing here. I guess I could build a new kernel and put that on this drive, but it's such a pain to take the drive out of the laptop, remove it from the caddy, hook it up to a working machine, etc. :) Thanks. --Danny, probably putting the laptop back up on eBay anyway, since it can't boot from the darn CD-ROM, but it can boot from a *token ring* network.